HANNES BAJOHR

DE
Portrait of Hannes Bajohr.(C) Jen Siska

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley. My work brings together German intellectual history, literary theory, and media studies, with a current emphasis on how large language models and generative AI are reshaping the conditions of writing, interpretation, and textual culture. I am especially interested in the ways computational systems produce new expectations of style, voice, and meaning—and in what these shifts reveal about older philosophical debates on language and the human, from Hans Blumenberg to twentieth-century philosophical anthropology. Alongside my scholarship, I work as an author of generative literature and have published experimental texts with the writers’ collective 0x0a, including the AI-assisted novel Berlin, Miami (2023). I am currently developing projects on “post-artificial writing” and “negative anthropology,” and, together with Nina Beguš, I co-lead the research initiatives The Latent Spaces of Culture and NarrAItion: Bridging the Humanities and AI.

NEWS

  • https://eliterature.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/cropped-elo_logo_vector.jpg

    N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature

    I am delighted that the Electronic Literature Organization has recognized my essay “On Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts: Machine Learning and the Reading Expectations Towards Literary and Non-Literary Writing” with the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature this year.

  • New book: Ad Judith N. Shklar

    New book: Ad Judith N. Shklar

    Today is the publication date of “Ad Judith N. Shklar: Werk – Leben – Gegenwart,” co-written by Rieke Trimçev and me, with Europäische Verlagsanstalt.

  • New volume: Quellcodekritik

    New volume: Quellcodekritik

    Today, the collected volume Quellcodekritik: Zur Philologie von Algorithmen – edited by Markus Krajewski and myself – is published with August Verlag (German). There is an Open Access PDF free for download here. From the description: Algorithms determine our situation. From Google’s PageRank algorithm to the automatic allocation of loans, their logic intervenes in our…

  • New Novel: (Berlin, Miami)

    New Novel: (Berlin, Miami)

    On November 2, my German language novel (Berlin, Miami) – written in cooperation with a self-trained large language model – was published by Rohstoff Verlag. I reported on the making-of in July in Tagesspiegel (German). From the publisher’s description: “The world in Hannes Bajohr’s (Berlin, Miami) is all that is the case for an AI…

  • New Installation: Prognostications

    New Installation: Prognostications

    For the exhibition “Data Alchemy – Observing Patterns from Galileo to Artificial Intelligence”, curated by Liat Grayver and Adrian Notz at the Collegium Helveticum, I contributed the installation “Prognostications”.

  • New Text: Dumb Meaning

    New Text: Dumb Meaning

    I published an essay about what I call “dumb meaning” – the kind of limited, not quite human meaning that large language models and multimodal AI processes. While not meaningful in broad sense, I argue, it is not meaningless either.

  • Whoever Controls Language Models Controls Politics

    Whoever Controls Language Models Controls Politics

    The problem with large language models is not technical, but political: It is that the medium of politics – language – is privatized.

  • New Book: Schreiben in Distanz

    New Book: Schreiben in Distanz

    My Hildesheim Poetics Lecture has come out as a book (in German).

  • Max Bense, “On Natural and Artificial Poetry” (1962)

    Max Bense, “On Natural and Artificial Poetry” (1962)

    A rough translation of Max Bense’s prescient essay “On Natural and Artificial Poetry” from 1962.

  • On Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts

    On Artificial and Post-Artificial Texts

    This is a condensed version of my Walter Höllerer Lecture. It discusses the changed reading expectations after ChatGPT.

Get In Touch