GERMAN STUDIES: NEW PERSPECTIVESGERMAN STUDIES: NEW PERSPECTIVESIf language is the "house of our being," as Martin Heidegger once asserted, then artificial intelligence has undoubtedly broken into that house. Who, then, is the speaker in AI-generated texts? According to whose principles and values are these texts generated? AI is forcing society to confront longstanding questions that have been neglected because of their complexity. There should be less talk about how to reliably instill values in technology and more reflection on what those values should be.
The lecture will approach this issue using several German classics. It will employ Kleist’s essay Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden (On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking) as a counter-concept to AI’s statistical model of “next token prediction,” as well as Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur as an antithesis to AI’s “world-text,” based on data from all over the world and disseminated globally. Herder’s Ideen will give rise to the question of whether one should grant every culture its own way of being or consider a specific concept of progress as the goal of history, as Herder did with Christian humanism. The lecture will further interrogate the ring parable in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, with its quantitative method of evaluation (i.e., finding the right ring), as a model for the value orientation of AI. Finally, it will address the much-invoked “ouroboros effect” or “model collapse” of an “inbreed” AI against the background of the dialectic of the drive for substance and the drive for form in Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man).
Roberto Simanowski is an associate member of the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities at the Freie Universität Berlin. He holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies and a Venia Legendi in Media Studies and has been a professor of German Studies at Brown University and Professor of Media Studies at the University of Basel and the City University of Hong Kong. He has published widely in German and English on the aesthetics, culture, and politics of digital media. His recent English publications include Data Love (Columbia University Press 2016), Facebook Society: Losing Ourselves in Sharing Ourselves (Columbia University Press 2018), Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics, and Literacy (Open Humanities Press 2016), and Waste: A New Media Primer (MIT Press 2018). His essay collection The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas (MIT Press 2018) received the CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Titles for 2019, and the expanded German book version of its title essay (Todesalgorithmus. Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz, Passagen Verlag 2020) won the Tractatus Award for the best philosophical essay in German in 2020. Simanowski is currently interested in linguistic AI and its impact on communication and the distribution of values.
LOCATION:Barker Center, Room 133 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20241114T210000Z DTEND:20241114T210000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR