Season 1 Episode 1 12 min

The Narrative Machine: LLMs Through the Eyes of Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–)

Explores narrative fragmentation and whether language models contribute architecturally to the dissolution of coherent moral traditions.

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In the first episode of Machines & Meaning, we turn to Alasdair MacIntyre — one of the most important moral philosophers of the twentieth century — to ask a deceptively simple question: what happens to narrative when machines start telling stories?

MacIntyre argued that moral reasoning only makes sense within traditions — coherent, historically situated narratives that give our lives intelligibility. Large language models, by contrast, generate text by predicting the next most probable token. They produce fluent prose without inhabiting any tradition at all.

Does this make LLMs a new kind of narrator — or a threat to narrative itself? This episode explores what MacIntyre’s framework reveals about the fragmentation of meaning in the age of generative AI.