CONCEPT
Overinterpretation
Eco’s diagnosis of the interpretive pathology in which the decoder, finding connections everywhere, confuses the pattern she has imposed on the text with a pattern the text actually contains—a disease now industrialized by generative AI.
Eco developed the concept of overinterpretation in his later work as a corrective to what he recognized as a misreading of his own earlier radicalism. Having championed the openness of texts against critics who wanted to fix a single authorized meaning, he watched the freedom he had championed curdle into a license to read anything into anything—to treat the text as infinitely pliable and the interpreter as sovereign. His test for the difference between interpretation and overinterpretation was elegant: a good reading can be confirmed by the coherence of the work taken as a whole; a bad one survives only by ignoring whatever contradicts it. The overinterpreter seizes a detail, builds an edifice, and discards the remainder as noise or disguise, in a procedure that is unfalsifiable by design. Eco called this failing the rights of the text: not a single correct meaning, but a real boundary beyond which interpretation becomes invention.
Large language models are constitutionally overinterpreters—they are built to find