AI and the Fate of Discourse

ABSTRACT

A largely overlooked phenomenon is how chatbots are transforming our relationship to language. Like previous technological upheavals in our relationship to language (writing, the printing press, mass media), chatbots are destabilizing established forms of authority, scrambling the aura of the discourses they reproduce, and opening up possibilities for unforeseeable political realignments and new modes of thinking and making. We need a refreshed conception of the liberal arts, focused on the open-ended exploration of meaning, where we study things like poems and personal essays not to contribute to a discourse about them but to write poems and personal essays ourselves. Because building, fixing, and image-making are also meaning-discovering activities, we should broaden the liberal arts to include not just intellectual activities but all intrinsically choice-worthy activities that connect us to reality.