Does AI text affect readers the same way human text does?

Hermeneutics developed an observation that the text is not just information but "a condition of social processes" — a field in which fundamental cognitive, epistemological, and ontological events take place. The text is not a secondary component of social processes; it is partly constitutive of them.

If that is right, then the fact that an artificial text is generated differently from a natural text is less important than the fact that it enters the same hermeneutic space. A reader brings the same interpretive apparatus to an AI-generated essay as to a human-authored one. The text acts on the reader through the same circuits regardless of where it came from.

The hermeneutics paper states this premise explicitly: "an artificial text is equivalent to a text whose author is a human being" — not in terms of the generative process, but in terms of "the role played by the text." That role includes: updating the reader's epistemic models, producing meaning through the dialogical mediation of subject and object, and participating in knowledge formation.

This creates a productive tension with Does AI-generated text lose core properties of human writing?: the generative process eliminates crucial properties, but the effects in the world proceed as if those properties were present. The disruption is structural but the impact is equivalent.

The implication for AI communication design: you cannot treat AI text as a different category of communication requiring separate interpretive norms, because readers don't apply separate norms. The responsibility for what AI text does is therefore the same as for human text, even if the generative mechanism is categorically different.

Source: Discourses