Mikhail Bakhtin

Every word arrives pre-owned. This is the fact that Mikhail Bakhtin spent his career demonstrating, in conditions of extraordinary intellectual isolation—writing in Soviet Russia, exiled to Kazakhstan, his manuscripts half-destroyed, his most important books published decades late or attributed to friends for his protection. Yet the framework he built in those conditions possesses a diagnostic precision for the present technological moment that frameworks designed specifically to address AI largely lack. Where most contemporary debates about AI and creativity begin from the premise that there is a clean thing called “the author’s voice” and ask whether AI threatens, augments, or replaces it, Bakhtin spent his career demonstrating that no such clean thing has ever existed: the author’s voice was always already a chorus. His concept of heteroglossia—the irreducible multiplicity of social languages coexisting within any utterance—names the condition large language models most radically transform, not by introducing multiplicity but by resolving