14th Walter Höllerer Lecture 2022

On Thursday, Dec. 8, I gave the Walter Höllerer Lecture at the Technical University of Berlin on “Artificial and Postartificial Texts: Literature and Artificial Intelligence.”

Excerpt: “[We are] today already really on the threshold of being surrounded by texts that have been artificially produced – while at the same time we continue to grow ever more entangled with our language technologies in our own writing, so that even our text production is more and more supported, extended and partly taken over by assistance systems.

Therefore, I want to discuss – quite speculatively, but always with an eye on the state of the art – two questions: What happens, first, when we are exposed to artificial texts in addition to natural texts? How do we read a text that we can no longer be sure was not written by an AI? And second, in what direction might this development go if eventually this distinction itself becomes obsolete again, so that we no longer ask this question at all and thus read post-artificial texts instead of natural and artificial ones?”

The lecture manuscript, in German, can be found here; I have uploaded a condensed English version, “On Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts, here; the full translation – with a bit about Höllerer himself – is available here.


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