Tech Ethicists & Critics
Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism
Leif Weatherby · 2025 · University of Minnesota Press
A literary and media theorist argues that large language models do not simulate cognition but create culture, and that the humanities need new tools to evaluate them.
Summary
“AI does not simulate cognition, as widely believed, but rather creates culture.”
This book presents a theory of meaning in language and computation and argues that humanistic scholarship misreads how large language models work. The author treats LLMs as a convergence of computation and language and contends that they create culture rather than simulate cognition. He names the opposing stance “remainder humanism,” which he describes as dividing the human from the machine without drawing on theories of representation that include both. Reading linguistic theory alongside the architecture of LLMs, the book argues that generative AI captures language as first cultural and poetic and only later referential. It closes by calling for a “general poetics” and a new rhetorical training grounded in literary theory.
Summary based on the publisher's page ↗
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About the author
Leif Weatherby
Leif Weatherby is associate professor of German and founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University. He is author of Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx.
Source: Publisher page ↗