Language Machines
Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism
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How generative AI systems capture a core function of language
Looking at the emergence of generative AI, Language Machines presents a new theory of meaning in language and computation, arguing that humanistic scholarship misconstrues how large language models (LLMs) function. Seeing LLMs as a convergence of computation and language, Leif Weatherby contends that AI does not simulate cognition, as widely believed, but rather creates culture. This evolution in language, he finds, is one that we are ill-prepared to evaluate, as what he terms "remainder humanism" counterproductively divides the human from the machine without drawing on established theories of representation that include both.
To determine the consequences of using AI for language generation, Weatherby reads linguistic theory in conjunction with the algorithmic architecture of LLMs. He finds that generative AI captures the ways in which language is at first complex, cultural, and poetic, and only later referential, functional, and cognitive. This process is the semiotic hinge on which an emergent AI culture depends. Weatherby calls for a "general poetics" of computational cultural forms under the formal conditions of the algorithmic reproducibility of language.
Locating the output of LLMs on a spectrum from poetry to ideology, Language Machines concludes that literary theory must be the backbone of a new rhetorical training for our linguistic-computational culture.
About this Author
Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German and founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University. He is author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx.
Reviews
"Language Machines takes the success of generative AI as an opportunity to rethink fundamental questions about the relationship of language to referentiality and of culture to cognition. Leif Weatherby confronts these questions boldly and argues persuasively that avoiding them leads to what he calls 'remainder humanism'--a defensive insistence on a human essence defined as the shrinking negative space left by technology."--Ted Underwood, author of Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change
"Leif Weatherby reveals a rift in the humanities, torn open by the cultural technology of generative AI: we have no theory for what AI is doing to language. Meticulously mining structuralism, computation, poetics, and labor history, he constructs much-needed theory to account for the matrix of culture and language in which AI is embedded--and which it increasingly now creates."--Annette Vee, author of Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing
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