What happened: Three philosophers of language propose “the artifactual stance, a framework that reconceives human–AI interaction as artifact-mediated exchanges of candidate texts.” On this view “LLM outputs are candidate texts optimized for utility, not utterances bearing meaning or force. LLMs are sophisticated text generators, not speakers. Between sessions, nothing runs; between turns, no one remembers. What persists is a configuration and a transcript. The ‘conversation’ is a user’s solo performance, interpretive labour disguised by interface and artifact design.” Puzzles about “what ‘I’ and ‘you’ refer to in AI exchanges, about whether systems can lie or be held to promises, about the identity of our supposed interlocutors all rest on a false presupposition. There is no speaker behind the screen, hence no one to refer to, no one to hold responsible.” The questions that remain are about design, adoption and authorisation.
Tracks / corroborates: ARG-04 v1.6 on what a user addresses, and ARG-05 v1.5.1 on what individuates a candidate — here resolved by denying the candidate, which FWK-03 v1.5 §1.4 names bearer-denial: the subject of the attribution question is dissolved rather than a criterion moved. FND-01 v2.4 §2.3’s continuity-across-content-absence question is answered in the same stroke. The noun-grammar check at FND-01 v2.4 §8 applies to “speaker” and “no one” as it does to “self”: the stance reasons from the absence of a persisting noun to the absence of anyone, and the step is the one the project traces before answering. The symmetry it does not run (ARG-01 v1.5): “between turns, no one remembers” is also true of a sleeper between episodes, and “what persists is a configuration” is a description of a brain. Not acknowledged.
Not novel against: 2026-05-23-lanier-there-is-no-ai holds the no-entity position in its popular form and 2026-08-26-metr-instance-individuation holds the individuation question as a live engineering fact. The move neither holds is the thread-as-unit question — the one Chalmers’s “What We Talk to When We Talk to Language Models” answers in the affirmative — answered in the negative by a worked philosophy-of-language argument. A Note until that lecture is held and the two can be read as the pair they are.
Preprint (arXiv:2610.09064v1 [cs.CY], 6 October 2026, 24pp; 'forthcoming in Inquiry'), abstract and section structure read from the arXiv HTML 2026-10-15, quotations verified against the abstract; the body is held for the Chalmers pairing and not read in full here. A philosophical argument with no data.