Kristina Šekrst

When users address large language models, they produce directive speech acts whose pragmatic features differ from those of both everyday conversation and traditional human-computer interaction, and these features change as users gain familiarity with the systems they address. This paper applies speech act and politeness theory to a corpus-pragmatic analysis of 2,000 English-language prompts drawn from publicly shared ChatGPT conversations, 1,000 from 2023 and 1,000 from 2025, using the ShareChat dataset. Each prompt is annotated for illocutionary force, directness, propositional content, and the presence of politeness markers, and the distribution of these features is compared across the two sampling years. The results show a consistent movement toward indirect, implicit, and fragmentary realizations of directive force, accompanied by a decline in politeness marking. The largest single change, a shift of 14.9 percentage points, occurs in propositional content, where explicit specification of the requested action gives way to implicit reliance on the system's inferential capacity, suggesting that users have updated their model of what the system can recover from reduced input, treating it as a competent implicature resolver. Rather than asking whether LLMs "really" understand language, we should ask: what kind of language have we created in learning to speak to them?

For six decades, Star Trek has presented the ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence, and this chapter treats the franchise as a continuous argument concerning which entities should be counted. It starts with the cybernetic legacy common to Wiener and Turing, both of whom regarded the distinction between animals and machines as irrelevant when it came to questions of control and communication, and then goes on to "The Measure of a Man", in which a Starfleet court determines Data's personhood even though it is unable to define the concept it is applying. Searle's Chinese Room provides the main objection; Picard's defense in response is that uncertainty about consciousness creates an obligation to recognize that consciousness exists. The chapter then traces the question through the case of emergent sentience in "Elementary, Dear Data", issues of parenthood and property in "The Offspring", questions of authorship and self-representation in "Author, Author" and "Living Witness", where narrativist views of identity explain the Doctor's request to alter the historical record regarding himself, and the problems in "The Ultimate Computer" and "Prototype", when read in conjunction with Russell's work on control. Data, the Doctor, Seven of Nine, and the genetically enhanced characters from Deep Space Nine and Strange New Worlds all serve as examples of what shared citizenship with artificial and enhanced beings would require of the institutions that grant it.