In a recent post, Jodi Dean offers the most radical analysis of AI that I’ve seen.

Using a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and her theoretical smarts and humor, Dean detects a far graver significance to the loss of reading that Large Language Models are enabling and pushing, far graver than what we’ve all been fretting about with the decline of reading skills, student literacy, and all that.

According to Dean, Lacan tells us that language—and, through language, we might infer reading—is what infants learn through their separation from the mother (the mother in scare quotes; it’s really whoever is the provider of care). Language is how—or a representation of the fact that—the infant learns that its mother has desires independent from its needs, how the infant acquires words for its needs, and in acquiring words, how it acquires desires.

Desire is the space between our needs and their fulfillment. It is a space between longing and lack, pleasure and pain. We fill that space with language, with words to name our needs. Through naming our needs, our words create desire. Words are our desire. In that gap, which we fill with words that are our desire, we create a space of freedom, of subjectivity and autonomy. For all its frustrations, separation from the mother, or from whoever provides for the infant’s needs, is the key to the acquisition of language and ultimately freedom.

In Dean’s interpretation, AI—and she shows this through her analysis of the creepy utterances of Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg—promises to return us to the world of infancy, when all our needs are met, when there is no need to name our desire because we have no desire, since all our needs are met. This is the dreamscape, the propaganda, of AI; as Dean points out in her post, the reality is quite different.

AI is a return to a prelinguistic space. It’s no wonder that AI threatens our ability to read. It’s gunning for something far bigger and more fundamental to what it means to be human: our ability to use language itself.

You say Large Language Models? Dean says Large Language Mommies.