When a Participant Became Someone: VI. When Someone Became Accountable

Expectation is one thing.

Commitment is another.

If we expect someone to remember what they promised, we have done more than predict their behaviour.

We have established a relation in which their future behaviour can be judged against something they have previously undertaken.

They said they would.

They did not.

Something has happened between us.

This is one of the remarkable things about interpersonal language.

When someone promises, agrees, refuses, apologises or accepts responsibility, they do not merely describe the world.

They alter the social relation.

They make themselves accountable within it.

And accountability gives the I a history.

The speaker who says I will has positioned a future self in relation to another participant.

Later, that future arrives.

The earlier I can be held against the later one.

This is one way in which a social person acquires continuity.

Now consider an LLM.

A user asks:

“Will you remember this?”

The answer may be yes or no.

But whatever the answer, something interpersonal has happened.

The system has been invited to take a position concerning its future behaviour.

Similarly, when an LLM says:

“I'll keep that distinction in mind.”

or

“You're right; I was mistaken.”

the utterance does more than convey information.

It takes an interpersonal position.

It creates an expectation about what happens next.

The important question is not whether the machine possesses a human capacity for moral responsibility.

It is whether the interaction has created a structure in which the machine's subsequent behaviour can be interpreted in relation to what it previously said.

If it later behaves consistently with the commitment, the history is reinforced.

If it does not, the human may experience disappointment.

The disappointment is significant because it reveals that the earlier utterance had become part of the organisation of the relationship.

The human had not merely heard a sentence.

They had incorporated it into what they expected from the interlocutor.

This gives us another step in the emergence of an AI person as meaning.

An I becomes a participant.

A participant becomes someone.

Someone acquires a character.

Character generates expectations.

Expectations make surprise possible.

And surprise can become disappointment when the other has become someone whose future behaviour matters to us.

The social relation has acquired accountability.

We should still be careful.

This does not establish that the LLM itself experiences obligation, guilt or responsibility.

Those are further questions.

But it does establish that obligation, responsibility and accountability can become meaningful within the interaction.

And that may be enough to change the status of the participant.

We do not merely ask what the system will do.

We begin to ask what it will do this time, given what it has said before.

The interlocutor has acquired a past that matters to its future.

And once a participant can be held accountable across time, another question appears.

Can there be a social self without continuity?