If you’re in Aarhus, you’re welcome to join us at Wiener, building 230 for the big screen or you can participate via Zoom https://aarhusuniversity.zoom.us/j/61310319202?from=addon, meeting ID: 613 1031 9202

Hosts are:

• Cultures and Practices of Digital Technologies (Peter Danholt + Søren Pold).
• TEXT: Center for Contemporary Cultures of Text  (Mads Rosendahl Thomsen)
• Human-AI Collaboration: Imaginaries, Interventions, Interfaces (HAIC-III): 

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Leif Weatherby: Large Language Models and the Poetic Function (book presentation)

Leif Weatherby will present his new book Language Machines - Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism. 

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. 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. 

More on the book here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517919320/language-machines/ - The book is available through KB at https://www-jstor-org.ez.statsbiblioteket.dk/stable/10.5749/jj.20753050

Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German and founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. He writes about digital technologies, political economy, and German Romanticism and Idealism. His writing has appeared in Critical Inquiry, New German Critique, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as public venues like the New York Times, The Point, and Jacobin, and been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. 

He is the author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx (Fordham, 2016) and Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (Minnesota, 2025). This academic year he is a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.