Language is the Medium in which Thought is Generated

Is language the medium that enables thought to be venerated
and, if abused, by it derisively degenerated?

Each one can by the other be inflated or deflated,
a balloon that can be when their air is overheated, overrated,
both capable, perhaps of being each other’s derivative or precursor,
made by each other unprosaically better or poetically perverser.

In Language Is the Medium, NYR, 8/20/26, Richard Lansdown in Tasmania writes:

I read Dan Chiasson’s reflections on AI [“Think for Yourself,” NYR, June 25] with sympathy and interest, and thought the statement he issued to his students was absolutely first class. If I were still in the teaching game I would set it in front of my classes, too (with my fingers crossed behind my back). But in a sense, he underestimates the danger of the situation. Just as between them William James and Michael Oakeshott told us that there is no such thing as unmediated experience, so, surely, there is no such thing as inarticulate thought. Thinking is not “the medium in which language is generated”; language is the medium in which thought is generated, and that is why large language models are as corrosive as they are.
That infants have psychic experience, of the kind that Freud and Klein tried to illuminate, nobody would deny; but it is not thought. And we ascribe thought to animals only when it is articulated via vocalization, action, tool use, or display. The thinking we overhear in Ulysses is only there because Stephen and Bloom articulate it, however circuitously and hesitantly. Lawrence’s “Snake,” ditto. There is nothing brewing in the caverns of our crania awaiting its expression, and what “oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d” is a canard.
We had a case here in Australia recently of a senior university administrator—a pro vice-chancellor of quality and integrity, indeed—warning against the indiscriminate use of AI before it was revealed that her article was itself AI-generated. “I really do feel,” she said in self-defense, “that it’s allowed me to focus more of my time and energy on what really matters, which is the ideas, the thinking…rather than spending a lot of my time writing sentences from scratch.” What looks like a matter of simple intellectual convenience is more a case of poisoning the water hole.