Language Machines Volume 74

Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German and founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University. He is author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx.

• Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: AI between Cognition and Culture 1. How the Humanities Lost Language: Syntax, Statistics, and Structure 2. The Eliza Effect Goes Global: Intelligence as Simulacrum 3. The Semiological Surround, or How Language Is the Medium of Computation 4. Large Literary Machines 5. Computational Meaning: For a General Poetics 6. Poetic Ideology: The Packaged Semantics of Generative Culture Conclusion: Language as a Service, or the Return of Rhetoric Notes Bibliography Index

"Language Machines takes the success of generative AI as an opportunity to rethink fundamental questions about the relationship of language to referentiality and of culture to cognition. Leif Weatherby confronts these questions boldly and argues persuasively that avoiding them leads to what he calls ‘remainder humanism’-a defensive insistence on a human essence defined as the shrinking negative space left by technology." - Ted Underwood, author of Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change"Leif Weatherby reveals a rift in the humanities, torn open by the cultural technology of generative AI: we have no theory for what AI is doing to language. Meticulously mining structuralism, computation, poetics, and labor history, he constructs much-needed theory to account for the matrix of culture and language in which AI is embedded-and which it increasingly now creates." - Annette Vee, author of Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing