Mediation, Not Amplification

Applying Peirce's pragmatic maxim to Edo Segal's central metaphor, the Peirce volume argues that the concept of amplification does not specify the practical consequences that actually obtain in human-AI collaboration. An amplifier preserves the signal while increasing its power. A guitar amplifier makes the notes louder without changing them. If AI truly amplified human thought, the ideas emerging from collaboration would be recognizably the human's ideas rendered more expansively — and the human should be able to produce the same output without the tool, only more slowly. Neither expectation is satisfied. The concept that better specifies the practical consequences is mediation: a process that transforms the signal while transmitting it, the way a translator transforms a text between languages, introducing the mediator's own tendencies into the result.