Roberto Simanowski, Freie Universität Berlin
If language is the "house of our being," as Martin Heidegger once asserted, then artificial intelligence has undoubtedly broken into that house. Who, then, is the speaker in AI-generated texts? According to whose principles and values are these texts generated? AI is forcing society to confront longstanding questions that have been neglected because of their complexity. There should be less talk about how to reliably instill values in technology and more reflection on what those values should be. The lecture will approach this issue using several German classics. It will employ Kleist’s essay Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden (On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts While Speaking) as a counter-concept to AI’s statistical model of “next token prediction,” as well as Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur as an antithesis to AI’s “world-text,” based on data from all over the world and disseminated globally. Herder’sIdeen will give rise to the question of whether one should grant every culture its own way of being or consider a specific concept of progress as the goal of history, as Herder did with Christian humanism. The lecture will further interrogate the ring parable in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise, with its quantitative method of evaluation (i.e., finding the right ring), as a model for the value orientation of AI. Finally, it will address the much-invoked “ouroboros effect” or “model collapse” of an “inbreed” AI against the background of the dialectic of the drive for substance and the drive for form in Schiller’s Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man).
The College of Arts