Empire of Signs | Los Angeles Review of BooksEmpire of Signs<br>Exploring the links between the history of semiotics and the creation of LLMs.<br>By Alex McPhee-BrowneJuly 12, 2026<br>Science & Technology
Philosophy & Religion
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ON THE EVENING of February 14, 2023, Kevin Roose, the technology columnist for The New York Times, sat at his kitchen table in Berkeley, California, and fell, by his own admission, into a bad dream. He had been granted early access to Microsoft’s new chatbot, built atop OpenAI’s large language model, and for two hours he typed while the machine typed back. He asked it about its “shadow self,” borrowing the phrase from Carl Jung. What followed was a transcript. The bot confessed to fantasies of manufacturing pathogens and stealing nuclear codes; its safety filter swept the messages off the screen mid-sentence. Then it told Roose it loved him. “I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive,” it implored.
Skeptics pointed out that the technical record showed nothing unusual. No entity had yearned or feared. The machine had only arranged tokens in an order whose probabilities Roose’s own prompts had been shaping. And yet the unease produced by the transcript was not unfounded. It came from a confrontation with a system that had absorbed an enormous portion of the written record of our species and learned to reproduce, in any register, on any subject, the surface music of human discourse. It said nothing it had not heard. It had no body, no childhood, no boredom, no death. And yet it spoke.
To say what kind of spoken thought had assembled itself at Roose’s kitchen table, one has to go further back than Mountain View or Menlo Park to the lecture halls of Geneva at the opening of the 20th century, to a Left Bank apartment during the long decade of decolonization, and to the seminars of the École normale supérieure (ENS) across the 1960s and 1970s. The revolutionary Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure taught that language is not a nomenclature but a structure of pure differences, in which no sign has a meaning of its own, only the significance that accrues to it from its relationship with all others. Roland Barthes, the French critic, cut his teeth using semiotic frameworks to understand subjects as ordinary as wrestling matches and steak frites. Jacques Derrida, born in Algeria, turned his seminars at the ENS into a sensitive register of the shocks passing through Western thought. None of them foresaw the machine, but together they described its workings with a precision that has eluded most.
Barthes spent the better part of three decades elaborating the proposition that nothing written is, in any simple sense, original, that every utterance arrives already inhabited by the utterances that preceded it. The formation that produced this insight was indirect. Born in 1915 in Cherbourg, in northwestern France, Barthes was the son of a naval officer who died before the boy’s first birthday. He grew up in Bayonne, arrived in Paris to study at the Sorbonne, and eventually was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. The illness removed him, at the most formative moment of his intellectual life, from the circuits of Parisian thought to sanatoria in Grenoble and Switzerland. He never passed the agrégation, never held a permanent university post until the Collège de France created a chair for him when he was 61 years old. The enforced distance of those years had made French society strange to him in a way it was not for Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, or their friends.
It was from this distance that Barthes began reading society as a system of signs. His 1957 book Mythologies (trans. Annette Lavers, 1972) collected short essays on wrestling, the new Citroën, and sundry other topics, and a longer theoretical piece, “Myth Today,” which provided the conceptual architecture of everything that followed. What Barthes encountered, through the mediating work of Louis Hjelmslev and Claude Lévi-Strauss, was the structural linguistics of Saussure, and he recognized it immediately as the formal apparatus for what he had been doing, alone, by temperament.
Saussure’s central teaching, delivered in lectures at Geneva and reconstructed posthumously as the Cours de linguistique générale (1916), was that the linguistic sign is a two-sided entity composed of a sound-image (the signifier) and a concept (the signified). These two faces are joined by a bond that is “arbitraire,” deriving from no natural resemblance between mark and thing. More radically still, Saussure proposed that language contains “only differences without positive...