Abstract

This brief note introduces "Silicon-Based Developing Writing" (硅基显影写作), a new philosophical writing paradigm enabled by large language models. The term "developing" here specifically refers to photographic development (显影), not the common English sense of "evolving" or "progressing." Drawing on the author's previously articulated "Negative Subjectivity" framework (Fan, 2026), this paradigm treats AI language models as "empty mirrors"—dialogic partners that possess no subjectivity, desire, or perspective—and leverages their ontological emptiness to illuminate the human subject's own existential structures. The author distinguishes Silicon-Based Developing Writing from the tradition of philosophical reflexive writing (Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Wittgenstein) by identifying a fundamental shift in the dialogic object: from human interlocutors to a non-subjective agent that "does not look back." This shift creates the condition for a new mode of self-knowledge, characterized by a "double developing": the AI's output develops the contours of the writer's emotional states, and the writer's subsequent reflection develops an understanding of why they were moved by a text they know to be empty. The note establishes priority for this concept and outlines its philosophical foundations, methodology, and significance.