I just overheard someone on the street say “I’m going to Paris, not France”. It was seemingly offered as a correction to what the person with them had previously said. It was delivered in a matter of fact way that suggested it resolved a confusion. What on earth could this have meant? I could not think of a possible context that would make this statement coherent, other than (implausibly) that someone had booked a trip to Paris without realising it was in France. Out of curiosity I asked Opus 4.8 how many different plausible explanations it could think of:
Paris, Texas is the one that jumps out — there are Parises in Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ontario, and a handful of other places, so “Paris, not France” is exactly how you’d disambiguate if your companion assumed you meant the French capital. That’s probably the single most likely reading, and it’s mundane enough that it would be delivered in precisely that matter-of-fact, confusion-resolving tone.
But since you asked how many, here are the others worth putting on the table:
A person or pet named Paris. “I’m going to Paris” could mean going to see someone called Paris, and the companion misheard it as the city, prompting the clarification. Same structure with a boat, a house, or a venue named Paris — Las Vegas has the Paris hotel, so “going to Paris, not France” could literally mean the casino, especially mid-conversation about Vegas.
A shop, restaurant, or bar called Paris. Plenty of businesses trade on the name. If you’re local and there’s a café called Paris round the corner, that’s a perfectly ordinary sentence.
Ellipsis in a comparison rather than a destination. “I’m going to Paris, not France” might be shorthand in an argument about, say, where a language is spoken, or clichés about a country — “I’m going to [experience] Paris, not [all of] France” — treating Paris as metonym for a specific idea distinct from the country as a whole. Less likely on the street, but coherent.
A course, module, or assignment nicknamed “Paris.” Students sometimes refer to units, essays, or projects by a codename.
Mishearing on your end. It’s worth holding open that the actual sentence was something like “I’m going to pear-ee, not Fronce” in a bit about pronunciation, or “I’m going to parries, not France” — or that the second word wasn’t “France” at all. Overheard fragments are lossy.
The Texas reading is the one I’d put money on, though. Was there anything in the accent or surrounding snippet that would tilt it one way?
This illustrates the argument Milan Sturmer and I make in The Platform Learns to Speak (coming 2027 because academic publishing is slow) that far from being ‘bullshit machines’ LLMs are compulsive meaning makers. They strain to produce meaning from fragments in exactly the way a human being is inclined to do. But they do it faster, more comprehensively and expansively than any human subject would be capable of.
Mark Carrigan 