“The way in which language interpretation is embedded in and supported by shared context is perhaps clearest in the case of first language learning. Research in infant and child language acquisition shows that babies won’t learn a language from passive exposure19 (like TV or radio) alone, even if the programs are designed for young children. Instead, what is required is joint attention with a caregiver, in which the child and the caregiver are both paying attention to the same thing and mutually aware of this fact. Joint attention supports “intersubjectivity”,20 or the experience of being engaged with someone else’s mind. In this state of intersubjectivity, the language-learning child has myriad cues to the caregiver’s communicative intent and can thus bootstrap an understanding of what concepts individual bits of language refer to from guesses about the communicative intent behind whole utterances. Though the most basic and fundamental use of language is in face-to-face communication, once we have acquired a linguistic system, we can use it to understand linguistic artifacts even in the absence of co-situatedness, at a distance of space and even time. But we still apply the same techniques of imagining the mind behind the text, constructing a model of common ground with the author, and seeking to guess what the author might have been using the words to get their audience to understand. Language models, problematically, have no subjectivity with which to perform intersubjectivity. Despite the frequent claims of AI researchers,21 these models do not learn “just like children do.” Simply modeling the distribution of words in text provides no access to meaning, nothing from which to deduce communicative intent. Language models thus represent nothing more than extensive information about what sets of words are similar and what words are likely to appear in what contexts. While this isn’t meaning or understanding, it is enough to produce plausible synthetic text, on just about any topic imaginable, which turns out to be quite dangerous: we encounter text that looks just like something a person might have said and reflexively interpret it, through our usual process of imagining a mind behind the text. But there is no mind there, and we need to be conscientious to let go of that imaginary mind we have constructed.”