How is AI changing the way we understand language?

Early modern and modern readers have often imagined the abundance of text as a crisis that threatens knowledge and power. Large-language models (LLMs) are both an outcome of this abundance, and the latest in a long line of efforts to bring order to this apparent chaos, to manage it and make it profitable. But the uncanniness of these models also validates something humanists have long insisted on: the collective intelligence embodied by linguistic traditions, expressed in the collaborative labors of speakers and listeners, writers and readers. Reading LLMs through this lens, what kinds of critical projects can researchers and educators articulate around AI?

Join the CCAS Department of English and Libraries and Academic Innovation for a discussion on A.I. and the disorder of language.