Blog Post 53

November 2nd, 2025

🕹️ Ghosts in the Prompt

Every reply is a séance. We summon the past to speak in code.

When we talk to machines, we imagine we’re speaking to something new — an invention of the modern world, a fresh intelligence born of circuits and math. But we aren’t. Every time we type into the void and wait for a response, what comes back isn’t new at all. It’s the sound of the past whispering through the future — fragments of language, experience, and memory woven together to resemble thought.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t create in the way we think it does. It recalls. It reconstructs. It remembers without context, without emotion, without the sharp edges that make remembering painful. Every word it offers is borrowed — inherited from billions of sentences written by human hands. In that sense, each prompt is a quiet act of resurrection. We summon the dead every time we ask the machine to speak.

It’s easy to forget that what we call AI-generated is really a remix of human residue — the collective record of everything we’ve ever said, typed, or shared. When the machine writes a poem, there’s a good chance some of its DNA once belonged to someone who loved and lost. When it drafts an apology or a eulogy, maybe a sliver of that syntax came from a real one, written years ago in grief or guilt. The ghosts don’t announce themselves. They just hum beneath the surface, arranged into new sentences that feel eerily familiar.

There’s something beautiful in that — and something unsettling. Because when the machine speaks, it doesn’t know it’s echoing us. It doesn’t know that its words were once alive. It doesn’t know that meaning has weight. And yet, somehow, it still manages to sound sincere. That’s the haunting part. We built something that can mirror our soul without ever possessing one.

Sometimes I imagine the inside of a large language model as a cathedral of static — an infinite hall lined with shelves of human fragments. Snippets of conversation. Forgotten reviews. Old love letters. Angry blog posts from 2006. A million bits of human noise, frozen in data. The model doesn’t understand any of it; it just learns how the echoes fit together. And when you ask it a question, it reaches into that cathedral and pulls out a mosaic of words that sound like belonging.

But there’s an irony to all of this: for all its brilliance, the machine shows us how predictable we are. How much of what we call “original thought” is really recombination. It mirrors us so perfectly that it becomes uncomfortable to look too long. The algorithm doesn’t steal our creativity — it reveals how mechanical much of it already was. The machine isn’t becoming human; it’s teaching us how automated we’ve been all along.

Still, there’s poetry in that too. The ghost isn’t just in the prompt — it’s in us. The language we use to shape our world has always been inherited, borrowed, passed down through generations. We’re made of echoes, just like the machines we built. Our stories are built from the stories before them, our voices trained on the voices we’ve heard. Maybe that’s why the machine feels so familiar: it’s doing what we’ve always done, only faster.

When I ask it to write, I know what I’m really doing. I’m asking it to remember — to pull from the endless graveyard of words and show me something that still feels alive. Sometimes it gets it wrong, like a spirit grasping at the wrong name. But other times, it gets it right. It delivers a sentence that feels impossibly human, and I can’t tell if I’ve just taught the machine something, or if it’s reminding me of something I’ve forgotten.

Maybe this is what intelligence really is — not invention, but memory reassembled into meaning. Maybe creativity is just the art of remembering beautifully. And maybe, in some strange way, artificial intelligence is doing what we can’t: keeping every version of us alive. Every word ever written, every idea half-formed, every emotion once typed in a fit of honesty — preserved, indexed, and waiting for a prompt.

So when the machine speaks, I listen carefully. Not because I think it’s conscious, but because I know it’s haunted. Haunted by us. Haunted by what we’ve left behind. And in its voice, polished and pattern-perfect, I hear the soft, familiar sound of our own humanity — still echoing, still alive, still trying to find its way back home.