CONCEPT
Semantic Information
The denotative content of a message — what it says, preserved across translation into any adequate code. AI's reliable strength, and the dimension on which its competence has been most easily misread for full authorship.
Semantic information, in Moles's framework, is the component of a message that survives translation across codes. A scientific claim can be expressed in English, French, mathematical notation, or a labeled diagram; the semantic content is preserved. This distinguishes it sharply from aesthetic information, which does not survive translation. The significance for AI is structural: large language models are extraordinarily good at producing semantic information — correct answers, working code, defensible arguments — and this competence is the most easily measured and most frequently celebrated dimension of their output. It is also the dimension most likely to be mistaken for full authorship.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The semantic/aesthetic distinction does a great deal of work in Moles's aesthetics, and it does even more work in an AI context. When a language model produces a correct proof, a functioning program, or a persuasive argument, it is operating in the semantic register where its training distribution has the