This isn’t a new question. But it has been coming up lately in my encounters with David Gunkel over the question of whether large language models like ChatGPT can write. I keep saying that they’re not doing anything that people like Barthes, Foucault, or, especially, Derrida would consider writing. He keeps asking me how I, then, would define “writing”.

I should have an answer to that question, of course. This post is just a reminder to me to come up with something a little more interesting than “words on a page” and a little less mysterious than “any differential trace structure”.

Let’s see what I’ve got tomorrow morning!