By Lázara Ávila Fernández

We asked at the outset what happens to the act of signifying when its written materializations, already emancipated from the presence of the one who produced them, are transduced into data and pass through a different regime that correlates and calculates them operationally in order to return them as human enunciations, in “natural language,” without an act of signifying of its own having taken place. The answer runs through this essay.

The transduction of those materializations into data and their subsequent passage through the Algorithmic Domain fracture the semiotic continuity of the act of signifying; they expropriate it, and what returns is a quasi-sign that demands the actualization of an Interpretant. That actualization, however, does not occur in isolation. In its encounter with a situated human and from that human’s constitutive present, the quasi-sign acquires relevance within a new act of signifying and comes to occupy the position of a sign. Linked to that act, the Interpretant is actualized. When the completeness achieved in that encounter is retrospectively attributed to the output or to the language model, the inflationary illusion is produced.

Today, there is a growing view that more grounding will bring with it that Secondness that would make the language model a genuine creator. We must say that grounding (anchoring) consists of connecting the responses of a language model to real, verifiable data from outside in order to prevent the model from hallucinating or responding solely on the basis of its statistical memory. It is also carried out through the incorporation of sensory and multimodal information. In both cases, the fact remains that what comes from outside enters the language model after being transduced into data. Nor does it change the fact that the language model can be turned off and on with a click, or that it is not the consequence of the evolution of a living being but of a large-scale technological revolution.

So I dare to think that adding more grounding, more “anchoring,” will not resolve the issue. It will probably heighten the perception of the model as more intelligent, more human. But perceiving it in that way does not mean that such a perception corresponds to reality.

And in that possible perception that the model may acquire contact with reality, may have acquired such contact, or may be in contact with reality, we will only be attributing to the machine what it does not have.

Growing, founding, and being a guarantor must go hand in hand. Speed and sophistication are like soulless shops. “So many shops, so little soul,” José Martí left us these words in his letter to María Mantilla, and it seems as though he were writing that letter today for us.

Mannequins display the clothes; only the human who wears them gives them the act of the immeasurable.

Note: This text is an excerpt from Augere: The Death of the Author. The English version was translated from the original Spanish with the assistance of AI-based translation tools and subsequently revised to preserve the book’s conceptual terminology, argumentative structure, and authorial intent.