What amazement when artificial intelligence and machine learning have once again made a leap in development. And how sluggishly the philosophical understanding lags behind. While Microsoft is currently thinking about making the conversation bot ChatGPT from the company OpenAI, with the help of which schoolchildren and students are already diligently writing presentations, suitable for the general public via a cloud service, many are still stuck on the old question: Are computers really creative? And while Google is apparently only holding back its bot LaMDA, which pretends human empathy, so as not to undermine its other services, people in this country are asking themselves as always: do machines have a soul?
Since the legendary Turing test in 1950, the relevant debates have been going in circles. In particular, a religious war has broken out over the possibility of software to develop a synthetic consciousness, which is becoming more violent with each passing year. The opponents are stuck in a speculative exchange of blows that is desperately trying to withstand technical progress.
In this dispute, the philosopher, digital poet and literary scholar Hannes Bajohr appears to be taking a conservative position. At the same time, Bajohr, currently a fellow at Zurich’s Collegium Helveticum, where he works on questions of authorship in the AI age, calls for a shift in focus towards a more concrete question: What does it mean to live in a world in which artificial and so-called natural texts can be distinguished less and less?
In his Walter Höllerer lecture held at the Berlin TU last December, which was published on his website before it was published in the magazine “Language in the Technical Age” (1/2023). hannesbajohr.de is to be read, he pursues this “reading expectation” that needs to be renewed from the ground up. Based on post-humanist approaches, which emphasize not only human needs but also the rights of animals, plants and machines, he coined the term post-artificial text. Between marketing prose and genre novel, he examines how even literature in the emphatic sense will not get away scot-free: “The zone of unmarked texts is expanding.”
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