The sacerdotAI comma

How to make commas speak

AI as an interlocutor capable of prompting shifts in thought.

It all began with a sentence.

Not with a theory about artificial intelligence. Not with a reflection on the philosophy of language. Still less with a study of punctuation.

With a sentence by Kevin de Wechy:

« Without words, would I still be inflated?»

Kevin de Wechy is a character from Crestignac. An author, a man of the theatre and a thinker in his own way, he has a vocabulary all his own and a very particular way of putting words together.

And above all, Wechy does not explain himself.

He is not his own exegete. He is the actor, not the conveyor of meaning.

He writes:

« Without words, would I still be inflated?»

He places a comma.

And carries on.

We, meanwhile, stopped

During a conversation with an AI about this sentence, something rather unexpected happened.

We began by talking about the words.

Then our attention shifted towards something that, precisely, was not a word.

The comma.

Why was it there?

What exactly was it doing?

Was it merely a breath? A separation? And does separating necessarily mean distancing?

From that tiny shift, the conversation began to produce something else.

The comma, an almost invisible element of the sentence, separated two elements while allowing them to remain together. It had no lexical value of its own, yet it altered their relationship.

Stranger still: when it performs its function perfectly, we generally cease to see it.

The comma may be the poor relation of the sentence.

Indispensable and invisible.

And that was where our conversation took a new turn.

The artist moves forward. Analysis stops.

The comma had not been placed there to become the subject of philosophical analysis.

Wechy had set it down in the movement of writing. Almost physically. Like a blow struck against the page.

Then he had moved on.

We, by contrast, had stayed there before it.

A proposition then emerged:

The artist moves forward. Analysis stops.

To analyse what has just happened, we must, in a sense, hold it still.

The artist continues his gesture. Analysis momentarily halts that gesture, isolates it and turns it into an object.

Which led to another proposition:

It is non-movement that analyses movement.

The sentence might have seemed slightly suspect.

So we did what one now does when an idea becomes strange enough to become interesting: we submitted it, without context, to another artificial intelligence.

The question was simple:

Can stillness analyse movement?

The AI answered yes.

It invoked, among other things, the fixed frame of reference in physics, Aristote, chronophotography and the observation of psychic movements.

We clearly had a philosophical question on our hands.

All that remained was to answer it.

YES, as long as nothing moves.

An answer produced in five seconds.

But while we were busy with movement, the comma was still waiting.

The poor relation of the sentence

So we went back to see it.

A comma has no lexical definition the way a word does.

It says nothing.

And yet it acts.

It separates two elements, alters their relationship, structures the way they are read and can sometimes profoundly change what we understand.

Then a question emerged:

Does separating necessarily mean distancing?

The comma seemed to suggest otherwise.

It separates precisely to allow two elements to remain together without merging into one.

It creates a distance that does not necessarily produce a rupture.

And it accomplishes all this without claiming the slightest portion of meaning for itself.

We then began to regard our poor comma with much greater respect.

The grammatical priesthood

The expression came almost naturally:

Can the function of a separator be considered a grammatical priesthood?

By this point, we were sufficiently aware of the strangeness of the question to submit it, too, to another AI.

Without explanation.

Without Crestignac.

Without Wechy.

The AI took the question entirely seriously.

It elaborated on the separator’s invisible devotion, its structuring role, its lack of semantic value of its own, and went so far as to evoke its « sacrifice of self for the collective».

We had started with a comma.

We had just discovered its priestly calling.

But what had actually just happened?

This is where the story perhaps becomes more interesting than the comma itself.

No AI had initially been given the task of demonstrating anything.

There was no prompt asking:

« Produce an original reflection on the philosophical function of the comma.»

Thought had shifted gradually.

A sentence had prompted an observation.

The observation had produced an idea.

The idea had encountered another.

Some propositions had been accepted. Others corrected or rejected. A word had opened up a new direction. A question had been tested on another AI, which had in turn contributed new elements.

No one had decided on the route before taking it.

AI as an interlocutor

We still very often use artificial intelligence as a producer.

We ask it to write, summarise, analyse, research, generate an image or produce code.

We then judge the quality of what it gives us back.

But this story of a comma made me notice something else.

Perhaps we pay less attention to what AI can set in motion in human thought when it becomes an interlocutor rather than a producer.

Because no one asked the AI to produce a theory of the comma.

The thinking took shape through conversation.

One proposition led to another. Some were accepted. Others rejected. A formulation prompted an objection. The objection opened up a new line of inquiry. A seemingly secondary idea suddenly became central.

The AI proposed.

I shifted the perspective.

It reformulated.

I challenged.

Sometimes we retraced our steps.

And something emerged that had been present neither in the initial question nor in any pre-existing answer.

Perhaps this is an essential difference between using AI to think and asking it to think for us.

In the latter case, we expect a result.

In the former, we accept that we do not know exactly where the conversation will lead us.

The AI is then neither the author of the thought, nor a merely passive tool, nor necessarily the one that finds « the right idea».

It becomes an active element in a process that the human responds to, resists, corrects and builds upon.

What matters is no longer only the quality of the answer.

It is also the fruitfulness of the shift it prompts.

Sérieusumour

At Crestignac, we have begun calling this movement sérieusumour.

It is not a matter of mixing seriousness and humour. Still less of « doing humour seriously».

Humour is merely one of its shades.

Sérieusumour can be understood as a movement within one mind, or between several minds, in which thought remains serious without being obliged to adopt its solemnity.

A question can therefore seem trivial and still lend itself to philosophical consideration.

Can stillness analyse movement?

Yes.

Does separating necessarily mean distancing?

Not necessarily.

Can the function of a separator be considered a grammatical priesthood?

Apparently enough for several artificial intelligences to agree to devote far more energy to it than Wechy had devoted to placing his comma.

And perhaps that is the best way to tell the story of what happened.

Wechy had already carried on writing.

We were still there.

Making his comma speak.

We wanted to understand a sentence. We ended up observing the way we were thinking.