Inspired by Michael Riffaterre’s ‘Fictional Truth’, this article brings computational mechanisms of Large Language Models in conversation with literary and philosophical theories of language to show that their calculation of meaning is fundamentally unlike meaning produced in communication, even if both appear similar.

Since LLMs derive meaning from distributed semantics—form alone, detached from the world and its things—the article turns to “things” as discussed by Bill Brown in literature and Hilary Putnam in philosophy. Turning to their perspectives reveals how communicative meaning is calibrated differently than calculated meaning, and how LLMs’ writing constitutes a new mode with its own strengths, capabilities, concerns, and needs for care when making meaning.