On words shaped by systems without bodies, memory of conscience.
Some years ago, I found myself on a train, listening in on a conversation between two university students. One was composing a text using voice-to-text, the other feeding phrases into a chatbot for help with an essay on postmodernism. They chuckled at how well the algorithm “knew” what they wanted to say. “It’s like magic,” one said. I remember thinking: yes, but whose magic? And at what cost?
We live in a time when language is shifting under our feet. Words no longer emerge solely from mouths warmed by breath and memory, but are shaped, prompted, and assembled by something else entirely, systems without bodies, memory, or conscience. The algorithmic tongue has arrived. It is fluent, efficient, and tireless. But what it gains in speed and surface polish, it often lacks in soul.
There is a danger in fluency without memory. Language, after all, has always been more than utility. It is inheritance, identity, and the medium through which we commune with one another and with the divine. A phrase, when well-chosen, can echo across generations. But when words are selected by systems trained on a million indifferent contexts, severed from intention or encounter, they may become smooth yet hollow, precise yet unmoored.
This is not to say that machine-generated language is inherently corrupt. It can be useful, even beautiful. It can help us draft, brainstorm, or bridge barriers of access. I would be a hypocrite to claim otherwise, speaking as I do through a medium that relies on such very systems. But I do worry that we are not paying enough attention to what is lost when we surrender too easily to synthetic eloquence.
When we hand over our metaphors, our memories, and even our confessions to machines, we risk trading intimacy for efficiency. And intimacy, like all things that matter, requires slowness, vulnerability, and presence. It requires the labor of listening, the awkwardness of first drafts, and the honesty of a word that comes not from an archive but from one’s inner landscape.
To be formed by language is to be part of a long conversation. Our words are not ours alone. They carry the cadences of our grandparents, the idioms of our streets, the prayers of our people. The algorithm does not know your grandmother’s lullabies, the teasing words of your childhood friend, or the broken silence after your first heartbreak. It cannot feel the weight of words spoken over a hospital bed, nor the tremble in a sentence uttered at a graveside. It is not that such language cannot be simulated—it can. But simulation is not incarnation.
And yet, I do not believe we should despair. Rather, I think we are being invited to recover a deeper reverence for the word. Perhaps this is a moment not of linguistic death, but of linguistic reawakening. In an age where language can be replicated at infinite scale, the carefully chosen word, spoken with memory and meaning, becomes a radical act. A small defiance. A sacrament.
We can speak differently. We can remember that language is not only about being heard, but also about hearing. We can reclaim the pleasure of pausing before we speak, the dignity of revising a sentence until it fits the shape of what is true. We can listen for the voice behind the voice, the silence behind the screen.
Let us not become fluent only in the language of the machine. Let us become fluent, too, in the language of the heart, the neighborhood, the body, the Spirit. Let us hold fast to the speech of the ancestors and the idioms of the future, and weave them together not with speed, but with care.
