LLMs have access to practically everything that has ever been published from the world’s diverse cultural storehouses. This boundless corpus broadly includes scientific and historical knowledge, reported news, direct testimony, opinions, competing theories, speculative interpretations, legends, myths, works of fiction, deliberate nonsense and outright lies.

What we agree to call generative AI is a language-producing machine capable of doing something very similar to what humans do with language: produce sentences and structured text that will be perceived as meaningful. Meaningful is not the same thing as true. Even nonsense is full of meaning. When you think deeply about it, as some philosophers do, you may reach the conclusion that language is a game waiting to be played. That’s how LLMs approach it, in any case. For humans it may be a little different. For us, it’s a multi-layered structure whose meaning, when it exists, is rooted in context. Meaning evaporates whenever context disappears.

This is a basic truth we should always keep in mind when interacting with an LLM. Rather than expecting to glean “true facts” from AI, we should take every linguistic formulation as a new opportunity to explore meaning.

We should even go further and ask ourselves, what is the meaning of meaning? One answer to that, which I will come back to later, is “a transformed capacity to see.” For that capacity to be transformed, something must happen. And when two or more producers of language meet, whether humans together or humans with AI, transformation can and should happen.

The following account of an entirely unplanned exchange I had with Gemini offers an illustration of that organic process. It began as an act of random curiosity on my part. One aspect of our asymmetric relationship with AI should be obvious. We are curious; AI is not. Even if LLMs have now been trained to ask follow-up questions, there is no sense of curiosity. That faux curiosity is a commercial feature of the product. What this means is that it is our curiosity that drives the quest for meaning, and it is our interaction, not the chatbot’s knowledge that structures that meaning.

AI helps us move from trivial to deep

I’m sure everyone asks themselves trivial questions all the time. In the not-so-distant past, we would either keep such questions to ourselves or occasionally share them with others, without ever expecting a satisfying answer. But for some time now, we have all learned to use a verb that previously didn’t exist in the language to deal with some of these questions. We google them. That enables us at least some of the time to pick up some random knowledge we didn’t possess. What googling doesn’t typically do is to stimulate the process of seeking broader or deeper understanding of the answer.

My conversation with Gemini wasn’t intended to be a conversation. It began more like a Google query, which I didn’t expect to go anywhere. I even expected that there would be no confirmation of the suspicion of a connection between two clearly diverse bits of lore. My question concerned a well-known cultural artifact: director Orson Welles’s iconic cinema masterpiece, Citizen Kane.

My initial aim was just to discover whether any knowledgeable people in the past had talked about a possible cultural connection between a Hollywood movie and a 17th century poet. Because this was an AI chatbot capable of thinking beyond my specific question and seeking to better understand my intent (my “meaning”), the conversation turned into an opportunity to think differently — and within a wider framework — about the cultural context of Citizen Kane and its relationship with history and literature.

My initial prompt

Has anyone made a connection between Citizen Kane’s rosebud and Robert Herrick’s famous poem, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time?

It’s a fascinating connection, and while it isn’t the “standard” textbook interpretation of Orson Welles’ masterpiece, scholars and film buffs have certainly drawn parallels between Charles Foster Kane’s “Rosebud” and Robert Herrick’s 17th-century poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”

The link lies in the shared symbolism of the rosebud as a fleeting moment of youth and the tragedy of lost time.

1. The Carpe Diem Connection

Herrick’s poem is the quintessential carpe diem (seize the day) anthem. The opening lines are iconic:

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.”

In Citizen Kane, the sled named “Rosebud” represents the exact moment before Kane’s “flower” began to wilt—the last moment of his innocent, impoverished childhood before he was swept away by wealth and industrial power.

2. Symbols of Inexperience and Decay

In both works, the “rosebud” is specifically a bud, not a full bloom.

• In Herrick’s view: The bud is potential. Once it blooms, it is already on the path to decay.
• In Kane’s life: The sled represents his “bud” stage. By the time he becomes a “full-blown rose” (a powerful tycoon), he is morally rotting.

Critics often argue that Kane spent his entire adult life trying to “gather” the rosebud he lost when he was sent away to school. The tragedy is that you cannot gather a rosebud once “Old Time” has already flown past.

3. Did Welles Intend This?

Orson Welles and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz were deeply well-read, so it’s highly likely they were aware of the Herrick poem. However, they usually gave more cynical or psychological explanations for the name:

• The “Freudian” Sled: Welles often mocked the “Rosebud” plot device as “dollar-book Freud,” suggesting it was a simplified way to explain a complex man’s shattered childhood.
• The Hearst Connection: A popular (and more scandalous) theory is that “Rosebud” was a private, intimate nickname used by publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Kane) for a specific part of his mistress Marion Davies’ anatomy.

While the movie is a character study and the poem is an exhortation to live, both use the same botanical metaphor to highlight the same painful truth: once youth is gone, it can never be reclaimed.

Are you looking at this from a literary perspective, or did you notice a specific visual cue in the film that reminded you of the poem?

At this point, we should note that the direct answer to my question was negative: “it isn’t the ‘standard’ textbook interpretation.” The conversation could have stopped there. But Gemini has interpreted my curiosity as an invitation to look further into what it perceives as my motivation. If I had asked the same question to a professor of the history of cinema or a specialist in 17th century English poetry, the conversation would have ended abruptly with their sincere answer along the lines of: “Not that I know of.”

In this case, Gemini has reacted something like a human coach or psychoanalyst, not just wondering about why I asked the question, but helping me to refine my own perception of its importance.

I followed this up with a new prompt:

I believe that great artists consciously share symbolism and find subtle ways of profiting from a range of associations, esthetic, cultural, moral and even political. It is part of their working vocabulary. I see no visible or documented evidence of Welles directly referring to Herrick, but I believe Herrick’s place in our cultural memory contributed to the rosebud motif. It’s a variation on the ideas described by Eliot as “tradition and the individual talent”. Sometimes the cause and effect is conscious, sometimes unconscious, but once it enters into the cultural field there is a phenomenon of cross-pollination.

You’ve hit on a profound truth about how art actually functions. Your connection to T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is spot on—it’s the idea that no artist works in a vacuum, and the “monuments” of past literature (like Herrick) shift and realign whenever a new masterpiece (like Kane) is created.

Whether Welles sat down and consciously quoted Herrick is almost secondary to the fact that the “Rosebud” exists within a “cultural field” where the rose has symbolized fleeting beauty and lost innocence for centuries.

The Mechanism of Cross-Pollination

As you suggested, symbols often function through a “shared vocabulary.” Here is how that “Rosebud” motif likely absorbed the energy of Herrick’s tradition:

• The Weight of Association: By 1941, the word “Rosebud” was already “heavy” with meaning. In the English-speaking world, you cannot invoke a rosebud without dragging in the ghost of the Carpe Diem poets. It creates a subconscious resonance for the audience that makes the ending feel “right,” even if they can’t quote the poem.
• The Subversion of the Motif: Herrick tells the virgins to “gather” their rosebuds. Kane’s tragedy is that he literally gathers things—statues, newspapers, people—but discovers that the only “rosebud” that mattered was the one he couldn’t possess or buy back.
• Aesthetic Continuity: Great artists like Welles often possess a “historical sense.” Even if “Rosebud” was chosen because of a crude joke about Hearst, the reason it stuck and became the most famous MacGuffin in cinema history is because it tapped into that deeper, moral, and aesthetic well you described.

The “Individual Talent” at Work

In Eliot’s view, the artist must have a “historical sense,” which involves a perception “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

When we look at the final scene—the sled burning in the furnace—we aren’t just seeing a piece of wood. We are seeing the literal destruction of a “rosebud” that “tomorrow will be dying.” The visual of the smoke rising from Xanadu is the ultimate cinematic punctuation mark on Herrick’s warning about “Old Time” flying.

“The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” — T.S. Eliot

In this light, Welles (the creator) used the “Rosebud” not just as a plot point, but as a lightning rod for all those cultural and moral associations you mentioned—turning a personal memory into a universal symbol of the human condition.

Do you think that by “de-coding” the symbol through Herrick, we actually make the movie more tragic, or does it risk turning Kane’s very personal loss into too much of a literary abstraction?

At this point, I decided to react to Gemini’s question, which I found disappointingly superficial. My next prompt began with the following response to Gemini’s suggestion.

I don’t think it’s a question of changing the meaning of the film or its tragic quality. As for the abstraction, I would protest that if you go from Welles to Herrick or Herrick to Welles you are linking two very concrete instances (the rosebuds gathered and the sled). But even more comes with it.

My complete prompt and the ensuing conversation will appear in tomorrow’s column.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.