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Leif Weatherby will discuss his new book "Language Machines". A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion. At the Co-op
About the Book: 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 the Author: Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German at New York University, where he directs the Digital Theory Lab. He writes widely on culture, digital media, politics, and sports, for public outlets like the New York Times,The Nation, and The Baffler, as well as academic journals like Critical Inquiry, New German Critique, and others. His research has been supported by the Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In AY 2025-26, he will be a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where he will be working on his next book, "The Mismeasure of Mind: Against the Prediction of Everything".
About the Interlocutors: Anna Kornbluh and Mike Lipkin (Center for Public Thinking, University of Chicago)
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