We affirm that no materialization arises out of nothing. Every materialization comes from an act of signifying.

That is, something must have acquired relevance before it can exist as writing. It may be an experience, a memory, a need, an observation, or even a question.

In Augere: The Death of the Author, I begin precisely from that premise: from the act of signifying, in order to explain the fundamental differences between the Human Domain and the Algorithmic Domain with regard to the production of meaning.

I am not referring only to the moment when we choose a word. I am referring to something prior and broader: the event in which, through our relation with the world, something acquires intelligibility or relevance for us and may later come to be externalized—or not.

Let us consider a very simple word: lion.

We can pronounce it, write it by hand, print it, or paint it on a mural. Each of these appearances is materially different. Yet they all have something in common: whatever form the materialization takes, that expression preserves a continuity of meaning.

This occurs because there is a prior history.

There were human beings who had already established relations with what we call lion. In other words, certain events took place that made possible the existence of experience, cultural transmission, language, and memory. And, of course, there were also successive reinscriptions of that word without the first event that gave rise to it being present, although it is worth clarifying that in each reinscription there were acts of signifying as conditions of possibility and relations.

In short, what I want to express is that, before data, there was a world, and there were relations intrinsic to that lived, experienced world.

Now we are in the presence of a new event.

Our texts, our images, and other human materializations can be transduced into data and enter an algorithmic system that, after processing them operationally, generates an output in natural language whose appearance is nearly identical to, or coincides with, the materializations to which we are ordinarily exposed.

When the word lion enters a language model, it is tokenized. It becomes units that the system can process numerically.

In semiotic terms, a fracture has occurred in the continuity between the act of signifying, its conditions of possibility, and the transduced materialization.

First, because it enters a different regime, governed by different rules, where the relations and conditions of possibility that made the original materialization possible no longer operate as such. To give just one example: where, in the Human Domain, there was lived experience, in the algorithmic regime we find calculation, correlation, and the convergence of patterns in a vector space.

In addition, the language model does not maintain a relation of its own with Secondness, with the clash of reality.

To explore this more deeply, let us turn to the following passage from Augere:

“In the realm of human practice and experience, for an explanation to take shape, for a concept or theory to be formulated, for a meaning to be constituted, or even for an intention to arise, something must first have acquired relevance for a situated human. We are not speaking of a succession of events linked in chronological order, but of a constitutive event. That relevance occurs in the relation of a bodily, needy, historical, and social being with their world.

The actualization of an Interpretant is part of that event, but it does not exhaust it. It enters the universe of semiotic relations and conditions of possibility from which a new act of signifying may take place.

This is the key to understanding that, before a concept could be formulated—for example, about the differences among the colors of the rainbow—certain chromatic variations had to acquire relevance for that human. Differences do not acquire semiotic value by their mere existence, although they may constitute possibilities of signification. If something has never entered into a relation of relevance with a human being, that something does not yet exist as realized signification.”

From there, in Augere, I distinguish between two forms of present. I call the first the constitutive present.

It is the relational event in which something acquires relevance for a situated human: bodily, historical, social, and shaped by experiences and relations with their world.

I call the second the operational present.

It is the computational actuality in which operations are performed on data and internal states are modified.

This distinction is important because we tend to observe the final result and attribute to that result a constitutive present that it does not possess.

And I also introduce the concept of the signified resource.

By this expression, I am not referring simply to the text available for training a model.

I am referring to the set of relations, conditions of possibility, and materializations that made it possible for that meaning to exist previously in the Human Domain.

That distinction lies at the center of Augere.

Because when the output returns to us, it lacks, on its own, both relevance and the conditions of possibility that would allow such relevance to arise through a relation of its own with the world. That condition is reached only when the human places their world into it. Then—and only then—a new act of signifying will have begun.

Perhaps this is why the question is not only what artificial intelligence does with our most precious resource: meaning.

Perhaps we should also ask what the nature is of what the machine returns to us, and how much we ourselves contribute when we receive the output.