Textpocalypse Now: AI and the New Political Economy of Writing
This talk will consider the status of writing in the present moment not from the qualitative question of whether AI can write better than humans, but from the stance of political economy-meaning the role of writing in what Michel de Certeau once called the "scriptural economy," as well as online industries' insatiable demand for "content" and the increasing awareness (sometimes called the "Dead Internet") that more and more of what we read online is merely eavesdropping on conversations among machines.
Sponsored by:
Speaker
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Matthew Kirschenbaum (GSAS '99) rejoins UVA as Commonwealth Professor of AI and English after almost 25 years at the University of Maryland, where he finished as a Distinguished University Professor. He considers himself a student of texts and textual technologies in all their social and material forms, and his scholarship and teaching have explored literary intersects with printing and bookmaking, archival science, media archaeology, digital humanities, and now artificial intelligence.