TEXT: The Center for Contemporary Cultures of Text aims to understand the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on our textual culture. As we embark on this research journey, Morten H. Christiansen would like to bring up two questions for discussion:

1. Are LLMs merely stochastic parrots (as often assumed)?
2. Might LLMs require us to rethink how we define literacy?

He will present some preliminary results relating to the first question and outline some rough ideas for research to address the second (including how it might affect cognition). Although both questions are most closely aligned with the TEXT research theme looking into LLMs in language and cognition, the discussion of these questions will also be relevant for our understanding of what the future may hold for textual culture.

Bio: Morten H. Christiansen is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and Professor in Cognitive Science as well as TEXT Research Fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is an elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association.