Can chatbots make assertions, promises, and other speech acts? According to the currently most popular theory of artificial speech, the answer is “yes,” but only as a proxy—a stand-in for a human speaker or corporation. I argue that this neglects the relational nature of speech, suggesting that no human can be held responsible for most of what a chatbot says. In other words, the proxy account can account only for a few AI utterances.
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Guido Löhr (2026) studied this question.
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