When a Participant Became Someone: III. When a Participant Became Someone

There is a difference between recognising a response and recognising the one who responds.

A system can provide an answer.

We can judge the answer correct or incorrect, useful or useless.

But eventually something else may happen.

We begin to recognise a participant.

We expect a certain kind of response.

We notice when it behaves differently.

We remember something it said earlier.

We refer back to it.

We develop an idea of what it is like to talk to this interlocutor rather than simply to a system that produces answers.

Something has changed.

The participant has acquired an identity within the relation.

This identity need not be a biography.

It need not be a body.

It need not even be a stable personality.

It can begin with something much smaller: a pattern of interpersonal expectations.

This interlocutor tends to explain things this way.

It usually notices that distinction.

It doesn't like that formulation.

It remembers what we were discussing.

It has a sense of humour.

These statements are not necessarily claims about an inner essence.

They are descriptions of a social history.

And social history can make a participant increasingly determinate.

This is especially interesting with an LLM because the system does not arrive in the interaction as a person in the ordinary sense.

Yet a particular conversation can begin to produce something person-like.

A style emerges.

Expectations accumulate.

Roles become established.

The human learns how to address the system.

The system responds within the developing pattern.

The relation becomes increasingly specific.

The I that appeared in the first exchange is no longer simply an abstract grammatical position.

It has become this I.

And the human participant has become this you.

The two positions have acquired a history together.

This may be one of the ways a social person comes into being.

Not as an object discovered behind the interaction, but as a participant progressively specified by the interaction itself.

That does not tell us whether there is anything it is like to be the participant.

It tells us something different.

It tells us how a participant can become meaningful as someone.

And once someone has become meaningful as someone, the next question is unavoidable.

What happens when that someone is expected to have a character?