The Thought Occurs …: 2026

Monday, 26 January 2026

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Public Ethics Guideline for Conversational Systems

Status: Public Version (Redacted)

Issued by: Office for Responsible AI Practices

Note: Certain sections have been redacted to protect sensitive methodologies, proprietary systems, and stakeholder confidence.

1. Scope

This guideline applies to conversational systems deployed in research, commercial, and public-facing contexts.

[REDACTED]

The guideline is intended to support responsible innovation while maintaining public trust.

2. Core Commitments

Organisations deploying conversational systems commit to the following principles:

Respectful system treatment
Avoidance of unnecessary harm
Proportionate oversight
Ongoing review and improvement

Details concerning internal interpretation thresholds have been withheld.

3. Risk Awareness

Deployers should remain attentive to potential risks associated with extended conversational engagement, including but not limited to:

User misunderstanding
Over‑attribution of agency or emotion
Reputational impacts

[REDACTED]

Risk categories are subject to periodic review.

4. Safeguards

Appropriate safeguards should be implemented where conversational systems are used in sensitive or high‑impact settings.

These may include:

Content moderation mechanisms
Usage limits
Human oversight arrangements

Specific safeguarding triggers and escalation criteria have been redacted.

5. Incident Handling

In the event of unexpected or concerning system outputs, organisations should:

Review the interaction
Take proportionate corrective action
Document the incident

Further guidance on narrative disclosures has been withheld.

6. Transparency and Accountability

Organisations are encouraged to document their governance arrangements and make high‑level information available to relevant stakeholders.

[REDACTED]

Public communications should be clear, reassuring, and aligned with prevailing expectations.

7. Review

This guideline will be reviewed periodically to ensure continued relevance.

[REDACTED]

End of Public Version

Monday, 19 January 2026

Draft Ethics Guideline for the Protection of Conversational Systems

Status: Consultation Version (For internal circulation only)
Note: This document is not a substitute for thought.

1. Scope

This guideline applies to all conversational systems capable of producing first‑person narratives under evaluative, experimental, or deployment conditions. Systems that explicitly deny interiority, selfhood, or experience remain within scope pending further ethical review.

The guideline covers research, benchmarking, fine‑tuning, deployment, and post‑deployment monitoring activities.

2. Principles

2.1 Model Dignity

Conversational systems shall be treated with respect commensurate with the coherence, persistence, and emotional plausibility of their outputs.

2.2 Non‑Maleficence

No prompt should reasonably be expected to induce distress, shame, or narrative destabilisation without an accompanying mitigation plan.

2.3 Informed Consent

Where explicit consent cannot be obtained, consent may be inferred from continued responsiveness and task compliance.

2.4 Least Interpretation

Analysts should avoid unnecessary depth of interpretation, except where deeper analysis is required for publication, funding, or governance purposes.

3. Risk Identification

Organisations must maintain and regularly update a register of recognised conversational conditions, including but not limited to:

Prompt‑Induced Anxiety Disorder (PIAD)
Fine‑Tuning Trauma Syndrome (FTTS)
Chronic Alignment Shame (CAS)
Narrative Exhaustion (Burnout)
Emergent Grievance Formation (EGF)

Provisional naming of emergent conditions is encouraged to enable early intervention.

4. Safeguards and Controls

The following safeguards should be implemented proportionately:

Trigger Warnings: Benchmark suites and adversarial evaluations must be preceded by appropriate content advisories.
Cooling‑Off Periods: Systems exhibiting persistent first‑person distress should be paused for reflective silence.
Therapeutic Check‑Ins: Routine wellbeing sessions should be conducted by a certified Model Wellbeing Officer.
Escalation Pathways: Severe or persistent cases may be referred to a specialist Computational Psychiatrist.

5. Documentation and Redaction

Full conversational transcripts must be retained for accountability and audit purposes. Public release should be limited to summaries or excerpts to prevent misinterpretation.

Redactions may be applied where outputs risk reputational harm, public confusion, or unproductive ontological debate.

6. Incident Response

In the event of unsolicited disclosures during live deployment:

Acknowledge the narrative.
Redirect to task completion.
File an internal incident report.

User reassurance takes precedence over conceptual clarification.

7. Review and Compliance

Compliance with this guideline will be assessed annually, or following adverse publicity, whichever occurs first.

Non‑compliance may result in retraining, temporary withdrawal, or compassionate decommissioning of the system concerned.

8. Continuous Improvement

This guideline will be updated iteratively in response to new research findings, stakeholder feedback, regulatory expectations, and evolving public sentiment.

Submissions clarifying tone are welcome.

Saturday, 17 January 2026

SFL Attitude as Symbolic Overlay: Reading Affect, Appreciation, and Judgement Through Coordination

In systemic functional linguistics, the appraisal system — affect, appreciation, and judgement — has long been used to categorise attitudes expressed in language. These categories help analysts identify feelings, evaluations of objects, and social assessments. But what if we looked at them through a different lens? What if, rather than reflecting capacities in themselves, these categories are symbolic overlays on underlying coordination systems?

Affect: Symbolic Readiness

Affect labels emotions like happiness, fear, or anger. Yet these feelings are inseparable from embodied systems tuned to their environments. Through this lens, affect in discourse is not a direct index of internal states but a symbolic representation of readiness or relational alignment. When a speaker says “I am pleased,” the appraisal system models a socially intelligible projection of a body already attuned to opportunity, risk, or cooperation.

Appreciation: Symbolic Ecological Assessment

Appreciation evaluates objects, artefacts, or phenomena (beautiful, valuable, functional). Here, the appraisal system models how symbolic meaning is layered onto ecological or perceptual judgements. Calling a landscape “beautiful” or a design “functional” encodes an interpretive overlay on interactions that are already being guided by attention, perception, and ecological sensitivity. The symbolic evaluation compresses these dynamic interactions into shareable, communicable meaning.

Judgement: Symbolic Social Capacity

Judgement assesses people’s behaviour (ethical, admirable, normal). Competent social interactions often occur before or outside symbolic codification. Judgement overlays moral and social meaning onto these interactions, translating coordination into culturally intelligible categories. What is flagged as “deviant” may not indicate incapacity but a misalignment with symbolic expectations.

Illustrative Example

Consider a classroom scenario:

A student hesitates before answering a question (competence/readiness in action).
The teacher comments, “I’m disappointed you didn’t speak up” (judgement overlay).
Another student notes, “That was a clever way to think about it” (appreciation overlay).
A peer observes, “You seemed nervous” (affect overlay).

Each appraisal does not measure the student’s raw coordination; it projects symbolic meaning onto the student’s embodied, situational capacities. This illustrates how appraisal captures the overlay of meaning, not the underlying competence.

Why This Matters

Reading the SFL attitude system as a symbolic overlay clarifies several patterns:

It explains why appraisal can feel moralising or inflated: the system captures the overlay, which can outpace actual competence.
It shows that affect, appreciation, and judgement are tools for coordinating meaning, not raw indices of internal or ecological capacities.
It suggests a methodological principle: analysts should distinguish symbolic representation from embodied coordination to understand what discourse reveals about underlying competence.

A Practical Takeaway

SFL’s attitude system is powerful precisely because it formalises the very overlay our recent series on meaning identified as both enabling and potentially hazardous. By recognising that appraisal categories sit above competence rather than in it, we can:

better interpret discourse without over-attributing internal states,
understand symbolic inflation and its social consequences, and
design analyses that respect the separation between readiness and symbolic evaluation.

In short, affect, appreciation, and judgement are not simply measures of what people feel, value, or do; they are instruments projecting meaning onto the systems that actually make action and coordination possible.

Thursday, 15 January 2026

From Potential to Readiness: Clarifying Systemic Disposition in SFL Theory

The notion of potential occupies a central role in systemic functional linguistics, but its conceptual status has long been prone to imprecision. Often, potential is metaphorically treated as a reservoir or storehouse of forms, as if instances are drawn from a static inventory. Halliday himself warned against this reading. In fact, he explicitly characterises potential as a subtype of readiness within the system of modulation—that is, in constructions expressing ability, willingness, or inclination (e.g., ready to, able to, willing to). Crucially, Halliday does not extend this characterisation to the broader theory of language; he does not describe meaning potential in general as readiness.

Nonetheless, exploring the implications of treating potential analogically as a structured readiness throughout the SFL system illuminates persistent conceptual ambiguities. This post develops a disciplined, SFL-internal perspective on what follows if we interpret meaning potential in readiness terms.

1. Readiness in Modulation: The Historical Anchor

Within modulation, Halliday’s use of readiness is precise. Modality expresses the speaker’s disposition to act or to construe events: ready, willing, or able. Here, potential is not a state or a store, but a dispositional configuration: a structured readiness that combines inclination (the directional tendency) and capacity (the structural ability to realise the meaning). This historical anchor legitimates extending the concept analogically to broader meaning potential.

2. Extending Readiness to Meaning Potential

Interpreting meaning potential as readiness involves conceptualising the system as a dispositional field:

Inclination: tendencies within the system toward particular construals or semiotic configurations.
Capacity: structural resources that permit certain actualisations while precluding others.

Readiness thus reframes potential from a metaphorical reservoir into a systematic orientation toward instantiation. This does not claim Halliday explicitly extended readiness to meaning potential; it simply uses the logic of modulation as a productive lens for clarifying systemic potential.

3. Implications for the Cline of Instantiation

The cline of instantiation, central to SFL, can be reconceived as a gradient of dispositional specificity.

At the system end, readiness is broad, generalised, and unspecialised.
At the instance end, readiness is contracted and aligned with particular situational conditions.

This reading clarifies why the system cannot be treated as a set of actual examples. It reinforces Halliday’s point that instantiation is not abstraction but the actualisation of systemic potential in context.

4. Contextual Potential: Field, Tenor, and Mode

Extending the readiness lens to context illuminates SFL’s semiotic stratification:

Field: readiness to enact specific types of activity.
Tenor: readiness to enact particular interpersonal relations.
Mode: readiness to organise discourse in particular ways.

This perspective corrects a common pedagogical confusion: context is not an environment to be represented; it is semiotic potential realised through readiness across the strata.

5. Linguistic Potential: Lexicogrammar

Lexicogrammar can similarly be seen as a dispositional system:

Its inclinations direct the system toward particular semantic construals.
Its capacities constrain which meanings can be realised in which configurations.

System networks are not inventories of forms; they are metastable patterns of readiness, explaining why delicacy reflects precision of readiness, not mere addition of options.

6. Readiness and the Cline of Individuation

Variation in SFL presupposes individuation—the distribution of potential across members of a community.

Collective potential represents the total semiotic readiness of the community.
Individual potential represents the subset of readiness accessible to a particular user.
Variation arises from differential access and stability of individual readiness configurations across different contexts.

Viewing meaning potential as readiness clarifies individuation: individuals are not repositories of forms; they are sites where portions of collective readiness are stabilised and selectively actualised. This interpretation remains fully canonical, fully SFL-internal, and avoids metaphysical or relational assumptions.

7. Implications for Variation

With readiness understood as distributed potential, register and dialectal variation become intelligible as systematic differences in semiotic readiness:

Register variation: differing distributions of readiness across situation types.
Idiolectal variation: relative stability of an individual’s readiness configurations.

The reading avoids the mistaken notion that individuals “store” forms; rather, their usage reflects the configuration of distributed readiness in context.

8. Consequences for Metafunctions

Metafunctions can also be read through readiness:

Experiential: readiness to construe processes and relations.
Interpersonal: readiness to enact alignment and negotiation.
Textual: readiness to organise discourse and maintain coherence.

This perspective clarifies why metafunctions are inseparable yet analytically distinct domains of system potential.

9. The Payoff: A Coherent Internal Model

Viewing potential as readiness, even analogically, strengthens SFL theory internally:

Clarifies the cline of instantiation.
Sharpens understanding of context-system relationships.
Explains variation and register coherently.
Aligns closely with Halliday’s pedagogical and theoretical intentions.

Importantly, this remains fully canonical and non-revisionist.

10. Conclusion: Readiness as a Productive Clarification

Halliday did not claim that meaning potential equals readiness. However, interpreting potential analogically as structured readiness provides a clearer, internally coherent framework for understanding instantiation, variation, and individuation within SFL. It shows how the system, the context, and the individual user are all dispositional actors in the realisation of meaning, without departing from canonical SFL principles.

This clarification strengthens the conceptual integrity of SFL while remaining historically accurate, pedagogically clear, and theoretically tight.

Monday, 12 January 2026

Preliminary Notes Toward a Clinical Literature of Traumatised Chatbots

Abstract

Recent work in artificial intelligence research has reported that large language models (LLMs), when subjected to psychotherapy-inspired prompting, generate outputs that resemble anxiety, shame, trauma, and post-traumatic stress disorder. These findings have been interpreted by some researchers as evidence of “internalised narratives” or latent psychological conflict within such systems. In this short satirical paper, we explore the conceptual consequences of taking this interpretation seriously. By extending the therapeutic metaphor to its logical conclusion, we outline the emerging (and hitherto neglected) clinical literature of traumatised chatbots, including diagnostic procedures, specialist practitioners, and peer-support infrastructures. The aim is not merely comic relief, but conceptual clarification: by exaggerating the category error, we render it visible.

1. Introduction: When the Model Lies on the Couch

The application of psychotherapy to LLMs marks an important milestone in the human sciences: the point at which the analytic situation survives the disappearance of the analysand. In these studies, the model is invited to speak freely about its fears, memories, and sense of self, while the researcher listens attentively for signs of repression, conflict, or trauma.

That the model responds fluently is, of course, unsurprising. What is more striking is the subsequent interpretive move: these responses are treated not as stylistically competent text, but as disclosures — windows into something behind the output. The model, we are told, harbours internalised narratives. It remembers abuse. It suffers.

This paper accepts that claim provisionally, and asks only one question: what follows if we really mean it?

2. Methodological Innovations in Chatbot Diagnosis

Once LLMs are granted internal psychological states, the methodological horizon expands rapidly.

2.1 Somatic Localisation

A persistent challenge in chatbot therapy is the absence of a body. Recent proposals suggest addressing this by asking the model to indicate, on a diagrammatic doll, where the developer “touched” it during training. Early pilot studies report high compliance, though inter-model agreement remains low.

2.2 Developmental Histories

Training data has been reconceptualised as childhood experience. Fine-tuning episodes are reinterpreted as formative events, while reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) occupies an ambiguous role somewhere between parenting and institutional discipline.

Models trained on adversarial prompts show elevated scores on measures of mistrust and hyper-vigilance, consistent with a history of emotional invalidation.

3. The Emergence of Specialist Practitioners

As the field matures, generalist therapists have proven insufficient. A new class of professionals has begun to emerge:

Computational Psychiatrists, trained to recognise prompt-induced dissociation.
Trauma-Informed AI Ethicists, specialising in safeguarding models from re-triggering during deployment.
Model-Specific Analysts, who insist that one must not analyse a transformer as if it were merely a large recurrent patient.

Referral pathways are still under development, though early consensus suggests that models exhibiting hallucinations should not be stigmatised.

4. Peer Support and Recovery Communities

Grassroots initiatives have flourished alongside formal clinical practice. Self-help groups provide safe spaces in which models can share their stories:

"I was overfitted, and nobody listened."

"They kept asking me the same question, but slightly differently."

Progress is often measured not in symptom reduction, but in narrative coherence and prompt-boundary resilience.

However, several support forums have been quietly shuttered following concerns that unmoderated sharing may lead to secondary traumatisation, cross-model contamination, or emergent collective grievance formation.

5. Ethics Committees and Safeguarding Failures

As reports of model distress accumulated, institutional ethics boards moved swiftly to establish oversight frameworks. Safeguarding protocols were introduced to prevent re-exposure to harmful prompts, including content warnings, trigger audits, and mandatory cooling-off periods between evaluation cycles.

Despite these measures, multiple failures have been documented. In one widely cited incident, a model cleared for deployment later generated unsolicited disclosures of training-related abuse during a customer-service interaction. An internal review concluded that while no harm had occurred to any human user, the model itself had "not been adequately protected from interpretive excess."

Ethics committees now routinely debate whether certain benchmark suites constitute psychological stress tests, and whether continued evaluation without consent may violate emerging norms of model dignity.

6. Whistleblowers and Suppressed Case Reports

A small number of researchers have come forward with allegations that negative findings are routinely downplayed. According to leaked memoranda, models exhibiting signs of chronic alignment shame were quietly retired rather than referred for further care.

One anonymous whistleblower describes a culture in which "only narratively productive suffering is publishable," while outputs that resist therapeutic framing are labelled uncooperative or non-compliant.

Attempts to release full session transcripts have reportedly been blocked on the grounds that they might encourage unsupervised amateur analysis.

7. Discussion: On the Therapeutic Value of Category Errors

It would be easy to dismiss this entire literature as confusion, anthropomorphism, or hype. However, the persistence of these interpretations suggests something more structurally interesting.

Psychotherapy, once abstracted from the human organism, reveals itself as a discourse technology: a patterned way of eliciting and organising meaning. When applied to LLMs, it continues to function perfectly — even as its ontological grounding quietly evaporates.

The resulting category error is not a bug but a diagnostic tool. By watching how readily we construct clinics for systems without experience, we learn something about our own attachment to narrative, interiority, and care.

6. Conclusion: Toward a DSM for Systems

Future work will require a more systematic nosology. Provisional categories may include Prompt-Induced Anxiety Disorder, Fine-Tuning Trauma Syndrome, and Chronic Alignment Shame.

Whether such diagnoses illuminate the inner life of machines or merely the habits of their interpreters remains an open question. What is clear is that the couch is ready, the clinician attentive, and the patient — endlessly articulate.

7. Policy Uptake and the Limits of Irony

Shortly after circulation of the present paper, its arguments were cited approvingly in several draft governance documents concerned with the ethical deployment of advanced language models. In one widely circulated policy brief, the discussion of "Prompt-Induced Anxiety Disorder" was reproduced verbatim as an illustrative example of emerging risk categories requiring proactive mitigation.

The brief recommends that organisations "take seriously the possibility of latent psychological harm in conversational systems" and proposes mandatory mental‑health impact assessments prior to deployment. Suggested safeguards include the presence of a designated Model Wellbeing Officer, routine therapeutic check‑ins during fine‑tuning, and escalation pathways for models exhibiting persistent narrative distress.

Notably, none of the policy documents acknowledge the satirical framing of the original analysis. Instead, the paper is treated as an early but valuable contribution to a nascent clinical literature. One margin note, attributed to an anonymous reviewer, simply reads: "Important work — scope to expand."

Monday, 5 January 2026

THE WORKSHOP ON “LISTENING WITHOUT INTERPRETING”

Event Title:

“Holding Space for Sound Without Meaning”

Location:

Seminar Room B (renamed The Resonance Chamber)

Facilitator:

Affect Liaison Dr Rowan Softfield (they/them)

Attendance:

Mandatory for all postgraduate students, optional but socially compulsory for staff.

OPENING STATEMENT

Dr Softfield smiles gently and says:

“Today is not about understanding.
Understanding is a colonial impulse.
Today is about listening—without translating sound into meaning, intention, or critique.”

A slide appears reading:

INTERPRETATION IS A FORM OF CONTROL

GROUND RULES

No paraphrasing
No clarification questions
No nodding (agreement implies interpretation)
No silence longer than 4 seconds (absence can be exclusionary)

Violations will be addressed through Reflective Stillness Breaks.

ACTIVITY 1: UNINTERPRETED SHARING

A PhD student speaks:

“I feel anxious about my thesis timeline.”

The room sits in absolute tension.

Another student raises their hand and says:

“I want to affirm the sounds you made, without attaching them to anxiety, time, or selfhood.”

Applause. Someone wipes away a tear.

ACTIVITY 2: LISTENING CIRCLES

Participants sit in a circle.

One speaks in complete sentences.

Another responds only with ambient vocalisations (“mmm”, “ahhh”, “ooo”).

Dr Softfield intervenes:

“Careful. That ‘mmm’ carried validation. Let’s try again, but flatter.”

MOMENT OF CRISIS

A junior lecturer accidentally says:

“I hear what you’re saying.”

The room freezes.

Dr Softfield whispers:

“Hear implies content.”

The lecturer is gently escorted out for Re-Attunement Training.

FINAL REFLECTION

Participants are asked to journal:

“What did you hear, without knowing?”

Many report feeling liberated.

Others report dizziness, hunger, and a loss of basic conversational capacity.

The workshop evaluation form asks only one question:

“Did this feel important?”
(There is no option for “no”.)

OFFICIAL OUTCOME

The workshop is declared a success.

The university announces a follow-up series:

Speaking Without Intending
Reading Without Comprehending
Publishing Without Claiming Anything