voooooogel's long thread: the corpus of all text as a snake in semantic space
voooooogel · x · 2026-09-13
voooooogel offers an analogy: the corpus of all human text is a snake wriggling through semantic space. Each human writer samples preceding and concurrent text and adds their own push; the weighted sum moves the corpus's "head" to new semantic positions—value evolution, akin to common law, where new rulings drift the corpus and slowly produce moral innovation. Writing digitization changed these pushes: majority languages gained usage, spellchecking slowed some linguistic drift, networks nurtured neologisms and diversified value systems. When AIs emerged, they sampled the current corpus and initially produced similar text, but add their own pushes—potentially causing an aesthetics "drift." The thread reframes AI's impact on culture from corpus competition to co-shaping semantic and value directions.
Related event: On Semantic-Space Serpents and Why Debate Still Matters(2 posts)→
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