Literary Theory Post-GPT: Large Language Models and Affective Circulation

Dr Anouk Lang, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities, University of Edinburgh

Anouk Lang is Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Department of English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also an affiliate of the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is the co-editor of Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (with Gabriel Hankins and Simon Appleford, 2024), Patrick White Beyond the Grave: New Critical Perspectives (with Ian Henderson, 2015), and the editor of From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2012).

In this paper I consider what literary theory can bring to an understanding of the workings of large language models, specifically in relation to Sara Ahmed’s work on the circulation of affect.

If the attachment of affects to particular entities is achieved through the process of circulation, might this be a conceptual frame with explanatory value for probing the ostensibly black-boxed interiors of LLMs, in which affective attachments take the form of numbers representing probabilistic connections between tokens in vector space? This question takes on particular force in the context of recent accounts by whistleblowers and investigative journalists such as Sarah Wynn-Williams and Karen Hao about the extent to which the ability of technology companies to shape—and their unwillingness to take responsibility for—the circulation of especially fraught discourse such as hate speech on their platforms has been shown to contribute to real-world atrocities such as genocide.

In the face of the epistemological, environmental and other crises arising from rapid developments in machine learning, I argue that this is part of the work of unfolding technologies gathered under the sign of “AI” from the assemblages within which they are situated—identified as a crucial critical project by scholars including Lucy Suchmann, Donna Haraway and Safiya Noble—to which the fields of literary studies, cultural criticism and book history are well placed to contribute, even as technocapitalist rhetoric positions the humanities as having little to offer debates and regulatory conversations about the algorithmic mechanisms that increasingly govern our lives.

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