Artificial linguistic creativity: Its history and semiotic conditions

FBK Aula Piccola
Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Polo delle Scienze Umane e sociali
Aula Piccola
FBK Aula Piccola
Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Polo delle Scienze Umane e sociali
Aula Piccola
What is artificial linguistic creativity?
An historical point of view will serve as introduction, focusing on the scientific ties of linguistics and cybernetics and shedding light on their convergence, between Shannon and Chomsky until the birth of natural language processing. Through this perspective we wish to delve into the technical mentality behind the making of computational models capable of understanding and using language.
Then, looking at the automation of language as an historical process, the importance played by the idea of creativity sticks out. We will provide an explanation of how ‘artificial creativity’ came to be, basing our discussion also on Boden and McCormack’s works and clarifying that one cannot speak of artificial creativity without giving equal weight to its technical conditions as well as to its epistemic ones. It will therefore be paramount to analyse, through an empirical example, where the generative and creative capacity of a linguistic model, as it is intended today, comes from. The focus will have to shift from creativity to an issue of digital spatiality, precising the role that datasets have in shaping how generative models based on neural nets work. The aim is to show the technical, epistemic as well as semiotic importance that this ‘data space’ has both in the production and in the interpretation of texts generated through computational means. In fact, this does not only concern the automation of a linguistic faculty, but, more generally, the statistical formalism on which machine learning is largely based can ultimately be described as a form of semiotic labour.
Niccolò Monti | Università di Torino / Université de Paris VIII
Seminar Series: Conservation and Transformation in Ethics and Religion
Scientific Coordination: Massimo Leone, FBK-ISR
Speakers
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Niccolò Monti - Guest SpeakerUniversità di Torino / Université de Paris VIIINiccolò Monti is a PhD candidate at the University of Turin and Université Paris 8. He studies the origins and semiotic implications of automation applied to literary writing. He has written on prompting as an artistic practice, artificial creativity, the histories of semantics and cybernetics. He is the author of Prompting. Poetiche e politiche dell’intelligenza artificiale (Tlon 2025).
Registration
Registration to this event is mandatory.
Registration closed on 14/02/2025.
L’evento si terrà in lingua italiana.
La presentazione avverrà in presenza in Aula Piccola FBK fino ad esaurimento posti e in modalità online.
E’ obbligatoria la registrazione entro il giorno 14 febbraio 2025 alle ore 12.00.