Artificial Intelligence as Cultural Technique: Do Chatbots Understand What They Communicate — Almost Perfectly? – Sybille Krämer (Leuphana University of Lüneburg)

Abstract:

Generative digital media—particularly those that produce text—create the impression of a dialogue between humans and machines. The more perfect the communicative interaction—which is often epistemically useful—becomes, the more it triggers anthropomorphic notions. This lecture develops a non-anthropomorphic interpretation of artificial intelligence by conceptualizing it as a cultural technique. A cultural technique, however, that not only changes the foundations of work and communication but also transforms basic scientific practices (“scholarly primitives”), comparable to the upheavals associated with the invention of the printing press.

The methodological starting point is the premise of a genuine technical nature of human being as practice. The central argument of analyzing the transition from alphanumeric to digital literacy is the “written” character of token-statistical operations in the context of the use of large language models. This “written” nature determines, on the one hand, the continuity of the digital—which must be understood independently of the computer—and, on the other hand, the radical, disruptive novelty associated with the normalization of artificial intelligence use.

This event is part of our summer term 2026 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.

If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.