Alone Together: Some Reflections on Talking to ChatGPT, Listening to Music, and Private Language
Open Review until 2026-05-08
Keywords:
ChatGPT, music, listener experience, private language, trust, conversationAbstract
This article relies on the author’s experience of talking to ChatGPT about music. These discussions are often unsatisfactory. This observation does not aim to discredit the conversational skills of current advanced LLMs. Instead, the example of an elusive listener experience serves as an object of comparison, showing that conversations among human partners often feature borderline-private content (in the sense of Wittgenstein’s private language arguments). Among humans, these gaps in meaning are bridged through structures of trust, reaching out to each other and various other “leaps of faith”; with ChatGPT, the private-language quality is exposed, as our conversations with chatbots do not rely on the underlying ground of trust and the chatbot cannot help us. This is a reflection on our (current) concepts, though, not a claim about the mindedness of present or future chatbots or predictions of what they will be able to do and when.
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