Fabula Rasa

post-Locke

It generates without lived experience. It produces meaning without having experienced any.

Not tabula rasa: fabula. Not the blank background to be filled, but the field that prepares itself. AI is not an empty mind awaiting content, but a device that produces narrative without ever having lived a story.

The AI’s Iliad does not come from Homer who heard the war of Troy told, from rhapsodes who handed down verses in Mycenaean courts, from a collective memory that weighed real losses. It comes from statistical patterns extracted from millions of texts, recomposed without anyone ever having mourned Patroclus.

What do we really sign when we sign an AI output? The question is not rhetorical: it touches hermeneutics, authorial responsibility, the very meaning of the word “creativity.”

Stories are cultivated like soil: planting, pruning, the compost of error. From knowing about (knowledge-base) to knowing with (knowledge-menth): knowledge that takes its place and walks. Postures before procedures; micro-rituals before manuals.

The algorithm that dreamed of electric sheep does not dream at all: it produces sequences of tokens that look like dreams to us, because it is we who recognize them as such. It is in our reception that the Fabula comes to life, not in its generation. This is not a defect: it is a fundamental feature that changes everything about our relationship with meaning.

There is a paradox, that of derivative creativity: AI is maximally original (it combines in ways no human would) and maximally derivative (it cannot leave the training). The critical gesture is not to collapse the two terms.

My daughter, faced with an article I had read to her, written in collaboration with ChatGPT, told me: “Dad, that is not your voice.” She was right. She recognized the Fabula Rasa in place of mine.

→ Full treatment in Chapter 6: Fabula Rasa.