Our new Lecture series Forms of Intelligence: Literary Knowledge in the Age of AI aims to bring in leading literature scholars to address questions about how our discipline might speak to the current moment—drawing on centuries of thinking about questions that computer scientists have recently taken up, regarding context, culture, affect, translation, and so on.

Speaker

Rita Raley | UCSB
Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, with courtesy appointments in Film and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, and Global Studies

Title | “Optimization Is Not All You Need”

Abstract

Language models trained on vast archives of human language are now governed by an infrastructural logic that systematically suppresses what makes that language worth reading. This talk traces the optimization regime responsible—from training objectives to interaction paradigms—and asks what forms of judgment might resist its closure.