ai can't express your thoughts (for you)

17 Nov, 2025

Imagine you are some sort of septuagenarian politician. You have important power and responsibilities, and your every waking moment is spent delegating that power and schmoozing various people in order to keep it. For instance, you delegate writing your social media posts to some sort of young intern who seems hip to that kind of thing, and the writing of your formal speeches likewise, and so on. You're not hip to that kind of thing. You're hip to the value of your time.

This is, in fact, fine. I don't want Bernie Sanders to learn how to use Instagram. He has better things to do and I'm glad he's doing them. He's still, in a sense, responsible for the Instagram posts put out by his office, but it would be silly to treat these as expressions of his thought except insofar as Sanders has a very well-established set of pre-existing thoughts he monotonously hammers over and over again.¹ The interns, if they are doing their job, have a good sense of the Sanders worldview, the Sanders vibe/persona/brand, and what happens to play well at any particular media moment.

So such text is great, at its purpose. Even if we imagine politicians writing their own social media posts, we know that it's a particular kind of speech act more closely related to a corporate entity (his office as senator and public figure) than a man; indeed we care about the former, not latter.² It would only be bad for relatively abstruse, perverse purposes, such as reading closely to understand the flow of his real reasoning process, or the texture of his experience.

Unfortunately this is what I thought of reading Frank Lantz's The Beauty of Games, which is full of paragraphs with frankly nonsensical endings:

And studying Poker is about this process of changing the way you think, for its own sake. Not to make you a better scientist or politician or doctor but to get at a particular kind of beauty in thinking itself. Poker is a sculpture that is carved out of the space between our thoughts and emotions and decisions and the world - the truth about numbers and randomness.

Unlike the rest of life, which is governed by utility and goals and the tyranny of instrumental reason, games turn these things in on themselves in order to observe them, enjoy them, set them free, and escape from them.

Imagine videogames with the vast, multi-generational lifespan of Go, the deep, mind-altering culture of Poker. Videogames that open a space in which to entangle our minds with the mysterious, infinite secrets of the universe.

Or that blatantly contradict themselves:

It is often assumed that, in order to be meaningful, a game must explore meaningful topics... But aesthetic experiences don't require thematic content in order to be meaningful. Music is about the ear and the heart and the pelvis; ballet is about the human body and sex and gravity and death; Go is about the relationship between the local and the global and between immediate benefits and future potential; and Poker is about fate and knowledge and virtue and a million other things besides.

Here's a turn of phrase I quite liked, in fact; it is "good prose" in service of a clear point:

This idea is expressed in the following claim: we have played Go for centuries because it is beautiful but also, Go is beautiful because we have played it for centuries. And you can say the same thing about Poker.

Now, I wouldn't call any of these excerpts nonsensical as a whole. In context, I "pretty much" understand "what he's trying to" say, or think I do. But I don't think that I've encountered a single metaphor in this book that clarifies that meaning. He either sahim to claim. Not surprisingly, the whole book (so far) is full of reasonable claims: this style of hermeneutics encouraged by this style, as with that encouraged by sarcasm, inhibits the ability to express really out there or subtle ideas, because the mind is trained to "snap back" to the closest available familiar idea. So in one sense it doesn't really matter that I don't know what he means by ballet being about death even when it's non-representational, or what "Poker is a sculpture carved out of the space between" some set of things (beyond that Poker relates to those things in some way), other than that my time is wasted; he either says it clearly first, or I can make a reasonable (?) guess at what would be a reasonable (?) thing for him to claim.

But in another sense it really does matter. Not surprisingly, the whole book (so far³) is full of reasonable claims: this style of hermeneutics encouraged by this style, as with that encouraged by sarcasm, inhibits the ability to express really out there or subtle ideas, because the mind is trained to "snap back" to the closest available familiar idea. Only being very deliberate about meaning, whether that meaning is literal or metaphorical, can do that. Worse, the core claims of Lantz's book are meant to be based on a mix of careful argumentation and observation of his own personal experience, precisely what this style tends to blur out.

Now, it's possible that Lantz just wanted AI to make his existing claims prettier, and mistakenly thought that it did this.⁴ It's also perfectly possible that the plenty of very clear claims in the book, at a prose level, were generated through the same process as "Videogames that open a space in which to entangle our minds with the mysterious, infinite secrets of the universe."

But if AI can express your thoughts, that's because you were able to express them clearly first, to it.⁵ There is zero (intended) meaning contained in the output that is not in the input. So just give me that - after all, I can just run it through the filter of my choosing myself!