The latest wave of ‚artificial intelligence‘ tools has been met with astonishing credulity. Since 2022, the large language models built on the transformer achitecture have been rapidly adopted in a broad range of fields. Importantly, they have wormed their way into the university and have propelled debates about intellectual property, academic integrity, and the aims and means of higher education tout court into a whole new sphere.

How is it though that these machines, which tend to 'hallucinate' to a considerable degree, have been embraced so fervently? And how is it that echoes of intelligence have been taken for the real thing by the best educated people?

Papers will include contributions on the affective regime of AI chatbots, on how not to talk about AI and how to challenge the anti-feminist stance of the AI-techno-rhetorical complex.

Programme to follow

Please register at: echo@geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de.