How does speaker responsibility shape whether something counts as communication?
This explores whether being accountable for what you say—standing behind a claim, being answerable for it—is part of what makes an act count as communication at all, rather than just text that looks like communication.
This reads the question as: does the speaker's accountability—being answerable for a claim, owning its truth or sincerity—belong to the definition of communication, not just its etiquette? The corpus says yes, and surprisingly forcefully. Several notes converge on the idea that communication is a relational act in which a speaker takes on responsibility, and that without that responsibility you have output that resembles speech without being it. The clearest statement is that communication is social action between people that does work in a relationship, carrying speaker responsibility and mutual uptake—and that AI generates content with none of these, while the chat interface hides the difference Does AI really communicate or just distribute information?.
The philosophical machinery behind "responsibility" gets sharpest through Habermas: to speak is to raise validity claims—to truth, to rightness, to sincerity—that you can be held to and asked to defend. On this view an LLM cannot raise such claims with genuine stakes, so its output isn't speech and the system isn't an interlocutor by definition Can LLMs raise validity claims in Habermas's sense?. That's responsibility as the price of entry into communication: no answerability, no claim; no claim, no speech. Chalmers's behavioral test is critiqued from the same angle—it certifies any system that produces contextually appropriate text, but communicative subjecthood requires relational-normative conditions like accountability and an evaluative stance, so the test is calibrated to the wrong phenomenon and waves through false positives Does behavioral speech output prove communicative subjecthood?.
The interesting move is lateral: responsibility isn't a property a speaker carries into the event, it's something the event assigns. One note argues subjecthood—the status of being a someone who can be held to what they say—is produced within communicative events rather than possessed beforehand Does language create subjects or express them?. That reframes the whole question. "Counting as communication" and "having a responsible speaker" aren't two tests; they're the same test, because the act of communicating is what installs the responsible party in the first place. This is also why the preposition matters: we talk at language models, not to them, because "to" presupposes an addressee capable of mutual orientation and shared commitment—the reciprocal answerability that makes uptake possible Are we really communicating with language models?.
Responsibility also shows up structurally, not just normatively. Genuine communication requires both sides to negotiate and revise a shared scoreboard—but an LLM treats the opening prompt as a fixed frame and can't symmetrically propose updates, so the user ends up the sole maintainer of common ground Can LLMs truly update shared conversational common ground?. Relatedly, meaning isn't transmitted by shared words; speakers must actively calibrate how language hooks onto the world, a collaborative labor that presupposes parties who are accountable for getting it right Why do speakers need to actively calibrate shared reference?. When only one party can be held responsible for the joint product, the bidirectional structure that defines communication quietly collapses into one person doing all the work.
The payoff for a curious reader: the debate over whether AI "communicates" is usually framed as a question about intelligence or fluency, but the corpus relocates it to ethics and social structure. The dividing line isn't whether a system produces meaningful strings—LLMs plainly do, sharing surface form with human language while differing in what produces it and what it does socially Are language models and human speakers doing the same thing?. The line is whether anyone can be held to what was said. Speaker responsibility turns out to be the hidden criterion separating communication from very good imitation—and once you see it, the question "is this real communication?" becomes "who, if anyone, is answerable here?"
Sources 8 notes
Communication is a relational act between persons that does work in a relationship; AI generates content without this relational structure, speaker responsibility, or mutual uptake. The conversational interface obscures this structural difference.
Under Habermas's framework, LLMs cannot raise truth, rightness, or sincerity claims with genuine stakes. Without validity claims, their output fails to qualify as speech, making them non-speakers and non-interlocutors by definition.
Chalmers' test passes any system producing contextually appropriate text, but communicative subjecthood requires relational-normative conditions like accountability and evaluative stance. The test is calibrated to the wrong phenomenon, creating false positives like puppets that walk-shaped without walking.
Subjecthood is produced within communicative events, not possessed prior to them. This convergent position across philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science inverts the standard picture of language as a tool used by pre-existing subjects.
LLMs process tokens and generate continuations rather than receive and uptake communication. The preposition 'to' presupposes an addressee capable of mutual orientation and shared commitment that LLMs cannot provide, making Chalmers' investigation built on an unwarranted linguistic foundation.
LLMs interpret all subsequent conversational turns within a fixed initial prompt frame, preventing them from symmetrically proposing updates to shared assumptions. Even when users pivot topics or contradict earlier framings, the model cannot absorb revisions into jointly held background—making the user the sole maintainer of conversational scoreboard.
The same words can mean different things to different speakers because referential grounding is person-specific. True communicative grounding demands collaborative negotiation of how language connects to the world, not mere surface-level word sharing.
LLMs produce strings via probability distributions; humans use language to address and relate to others. They share surface form but differ in what produces output, what it does socially, and what receivers should do with it.