Adoption has begun to exert a gravitational force in my thinking, bending my mind toward it at surprising moments. I have been thinking lately about our uncritical tendency to accept the idea that ChatGPT, and other chatbots powered by Large Language Models, embody an artificial form of reason, however imperfectly. It's now commonplace to observe that chatbots "hallucinate" facts, events, and things in their answers to the prompts we give them. Earlier this year I asked ChatGPT to tell me about the route that the Middlesex Canal took through the town of Winchester, Massachusetts, where I work. This canal, which ran from Lowell southeast to Boston, predated the Erie, and in some ways served as its more famous successor's model. ChatGPT told a story about the canal that incorporated truths and wild falsehoods in roughly equal measure. My favorite fabulist touch was its mention of a very particular style of truss bridge, which it alleged had been built over a particular river in town and is now listed in the Register of Historic Places. But there was never any such bridge over the river, and there was never any such river in Winchester.
I heard a linguist on public radio remark that some AI researchers object to describing these fabrications as "hallucinations," because to do so is already to grant a kind of sentience to the models that generate them. But these models are obviously not sentient. They are extremely computationally intensive text-prediction machines. Yet we love to be dazzled and fooled. The early pronouncements from software engineers and tech journalists that LLMs are "alive" already look as naive as the screams of terror from early cinemagoers at the looming locomotive seemingly about to barrel out of the screen.
Not only are LLMs not sentient; they handle language in as unmindlike a manner as one can imagine. To produce languagelike strings, ChatGPT was trained on nearly 600 gigabytes of text data--orders of magnitude larger than the corpus to which any human language learner is exposed. We master language on a much slimmer diet of words, and we do something no machine-learning model can do, now (or, I believe, ever): use language creatively. We produce language that is appropriate to never-before-encountered contexts and independent from direct stimulus control. Noam Chomsky called this "the creative aspect of language use" over 60 years ago, and it remains out of reach of what we call Artificial Intelligence.
Chomsky is making the same point still. In an op-ed published in March 2023 he noted that human minds, unlike LLMs, can, "by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make 'infinite use of finite means,' creating ideas and theories with universal reach." The key to understanding human language, Chomsky believed 70 years ago and still believes today, is identifying and describing the "finite means" by which we produce and understand language in its boundless uses--what he once called Universal Grammar. And Chomsky credits Humboldt, a German polymath and explorer who died in 1846, with the germ of this idea.
Chomsky cited Humboldt for the same purpose in "Language and Freedom," published over 50 years ago. There he linked Humboldt's ideas about language to his general concept of Bildung, described by a commentator as "the fullest, richest, and most harmonious development of the potentialities of the individual, the community or the human race." Bildung is the realization of what is latent within each of us, for which the essential prerequisite is freedom:
The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but there is besides another essential – intimately connected with freedom, it is true – a variety of situations.
Language, as Chomsky famously emphasizes, grows irrepressibly within each of us. Through the diversity of our linguistic environments--Humboldt's "variety of situations," one might say--we learn "different" languages, or what might be termed different realizations of human language, part of our universally shared endowment as human beings. And for Chomsky, the very fact that language is part of our universally shared nature as human beings can inspire a liberatory vision for human societies:
If in fact humans are indefinitely malleable, completely plastic beings, with no innate structures of mind and no intrinsic needs of a cultural or social character, then they are fit subjects for the “shaping of behavior” by the state authority, the corporate manager, the technocrat, or the central committee. Those with some confidence in the human species will hope this is not so and will try to determine the intrinsic human characteristics that provide the framework for intellectual development, the growth of moral consciousness, cultural achievement, and participation in a free community.
Where there are universally shared potentialities, there may be universally shared needs. And universal rights belonging to human beings as human beings.
And this is how my ruminations on artificial intelligence brought me, once again, back around to adoption.
When we speak of human needs giving rise to human rights, we need not be talking only about the most basic needs our survival demands. Obviously, human beings can survive terrible oppression and deprivation. Bildung demands more than this. I think we can see modern liberation movements as demanding that we enlarge our understanding of Bildung: movements for racial justice, for women's rights, for LGBTQ+ rights and specifically transgender rights, for disability rights, for the rights of migrants and the dispossessed... and for adoptee rights. All these movements demand rights and freedoms the absence of which stifles the development of individual human potential: Bildung.
Why does Part I, Article 8 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child--which the United States has yet to ratify--contain these words?
- States Parties undertake to respect the right of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference.
Where a child is illegally deprived of some or all of the elements of his or her identity, States Parties shall provide appropriate assistance and protection, with a view to re-establishing speedily his or her identity.
We can read these words narrowly, as a statement about a child's right to a stable legal identity as part of citizenship in a polity governed by the rule of law. In that narrow sense, the amended birth certificate assigned to an adoptee in the United States would not violate the letter of Article 8. But I don't think this reflects the spirit of the document. Children are politically powerless, having no say in the policies that affect their present and future lives. Those policies can, and do, interfere with the preservation of their "identity, name and family relations." The State of Indiana's "Baby Box" law is a shockingly clear example of this. Under this law, anyone can anonymously deposit an infant in a designated "newborn safety device," and those who find it may contact an adoption agency directly, with no notice given to any public agency or authority. It takes little imagination to see how literal human trafficking can take place under this arrangement. As far as the newborn's right to its family relations: no such right is respected. If Article 8 is not intended to prohibit state-sanctioned untraceable trafficking of newborn infants, then it is a toothless document.
People often suppose that the freedoms and rights that nations guarantee for their citizens must be good for something--that there must be some direct benefit from having them. So, for instance, we hear that the right to an education is important because it equips citizens for participation in a democratic society. And maybe so. But it's also true that as Aristotle put it, human beings by nature desire to know. Knowledge and culture are not luxuries for a fortunate few, but needs: we create and consume knowledge and culture by our nature, and we need access to them to develop what is essential in us.
It is not easy to know how to argue that the elements of what we need for our Bildung are, in fact, needs. Protection from violence, shelter, safe and nutritious food, access to knowledge and culture, care for our health: these surely belong on that list. What of access to our history, our origin in the world, and knowledge of our original familial relationships? We can survive without these. People survive without access to knowledge and culture. People survive under wretched circumstances. That does not show that their genuine needs are met.
A life bracketed in ignorance of one's original history, family, and community is livable, obviously. (Although the often cited finding that adoptees attempt suicide at four times the rate of the general population suggests a kind of starvation of need.) Critics of adoption are commonly told that if that ignorance is a disadvantage, there are compensating benefits. (Which assumes that a tradeoff of needs is inevitable and necessary.) But what countervailing need is so powerful as to entitle anyone to impose that ignorance on another? When is it in the child's best interests to seal her off from knowing who she is, in the nearly universally understood sense of where she came from and who her people are? What need is so great as to justify building the deletion and reassignment of "name and family relationships" directly into the legal contrivance that is plenary adoption? To pursue these questions is to pass beyond the interests of the child and into the wants and dreams of would-be adoptive parents.
Machine-learning models entertain us with their synthetic simulation of speech, but they are built on a model that bears no relationship to what little we know about how human beings use language. They are in this sense antihuman. At the risk of glibness I will say that something similar is true of plenary adoption: in legally codifying the idea that family relationships are deletable and transferable, it denies the importance that human beings actually attach to their identities: where they came from and who their people are. It treats people as, in one crucial dimension, "malleable" and "plastic" beings.