Weatherby, "Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (Posthumanities) "
English | ISBN: 1517919320 | 2025 | 282 pages | PDF | 3 MB
English | ISBN: 1517919320 | 2025 | 282 pages | PDF | 3 MB
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.
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