There is no intent in words in and of themselves. Intent always comes from something specific tied to neural syntax, which is lost in words. That's an illusion. There is intensionality, which is different, which is what you're actually talking about. Intensionality is vague, it's not meaningful without context. The problem automating words is AI can't solve the conduit metaphor, which is the idea the words alone code meaning. They can't. This is the achilles heel of AI.

I agree. Words don’t carry intent by themselves. Intention is always embedded in use. That’s why I frame fidelity as about whether a system’s continuation still serves the same human purpose. The “conduit metaphor” you mention is exactly the trap: treating words as if they inherently encode meaning. Models fall into this because they optimize surface probabilities rather than checking whether the function of the exchange was preserved.

In 1973 Basil Bernstein studied how UK scores in math defied class boundaries while scores in reading comprehension/essays stayed tied to them, and he developed a theory with Halliday that language embeds so much that we cannot decipher easily: dominance, status, control, land-centering, gender/mate-selection, and much more, that they assumed language was far more a social system of primate-simian signaling rather than what Shannon and classical linguists took as "communication". My guess is, LLMs are really unresolvable revelations of these hidden nuances. In a way, LLMs demand a specific language, which doesn't exist, in order to function.

That’s a really interesting reference. Bernstein and Halliday were basically pointing out that language is never just propositional, it’s always smuggling social structure with it. That’s exactly why drift matters: when an LLM compresses or rewrites, it isn’t just shifting words, it’s rebalancing those embedded cues of power, context, and purpose. Humans keep the “extra baggage” because it carries meaning beyond the literal. Models optimize it away. That gap between statistical surface and lived function is what I’ve been calling semantic drift.

Rather the opposite, that language is about social structure primarily and propositional secondarily.