[Linganth] LLMs and Ling Anth Reading Group - Courtney Handman - Jan 20 - 18:00-20:00

[Language Machines]

Dear Language Machines Network,

We'd like to invite you to our next reading group meeting. We'll discuss
Courtney Handman’s (University of Texas at Austin) draft article "*The
chatbot’s real self: textuality, cultural concepts, and the archaeology of
artificial personas*” on *January 20, 2025 **from 18:00-20:00 CET*. See
below for the schedule of future meetings.

*Abstract: Large language models excel in the reproduction of genres and
generic texts (Gershon 2023), yet nevertheless frequently produce
semantically incoherent ones. This asymmetry between the chatbots'
incredible facility for syntax, genre, and combination coupled with their
lack of human-like semantics has created a recurring dynamic in which that
partial incoherence seems to encourage some users to search for hidden
personas underneath or within the chatbot. That is, the bots’ facility with
structural cotextuality (Silverstein 1997) and yet lack of
contextually-deployed sense categories has left some users searching for a
"real" speaking voice. This asymmetry in capacities is exploited in what
people refer to as jailbreaking chatbots, in which users try to prompt the
chatbots into revealing a "truer" persona by circumventing some of the
safeguards built into the bots by their engineers. The search for
subjectivity in one’s speaking partner has a much longer history than just
the few years or months that people have been interacting with chatbots
(see Peters 1999). Using arguments from religious studies (Johnson 2021), I
argue that the search for a true chatbot persona is just the technologized
form of a much broader search for a hidden agent, as when participants in
religious events try to uncover the soul inside a subject or the god
possessing a speaker. The trick with chatbots is how quickly and easily
they seem to project that sense of subjective depth because of - and not in
spite of - the fact that they are extremely flawed interactional partners.*

RSVP here: languagemachinesnetwork at gmail.com to receive the Zoom link and
the PDF of the article (not to be circulated, please).

We look forward to seeing you there!

Anna, Siri, Michael

*Schedule:*
February 17 - Ole Pütz (Bielefeld)
TBD
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