What is an LLM? This turns out to be a deceptively simple question, particularly as corporate marketing campaigns and platform design try to make AI appear, ironically, as natural as possible. Efforts to understand what an LLM is and does tend to center either the technical explanations of machine learning engineering or else they focus on AI's cultural significance and social effects. While these are important lines of inquiry, they skip over the fact that LLMs are perhaps most centrally technologies of language, constituting a new way that language happens and even reshaping what language itself is. Scholarship has only just begun to realize that LLMs need to be understood in terms of the kinds of literary theory that offer systematic accounts of our encounter with language, and that the models therefore make this area of literary theory newly relevant to daily life. In this theory-forward course, we will take the attempt to answer the question "What is an LLM?" as a motive for beginning to familiarize ourselves with some of the main touchpoints and texts of formalist literary theory. Our first goal will just be understanding - getting our heads around these theories and their potential application to LLMs; our second will be to begin developing our own, more nuanced ideas about AI and its implicit values. Students will leave the course equipped with language and concepts essential to thinking critically about AI and negotiating the twin siren songs of AI boosterism and AI doomerism with nuance and sensitivity.
4 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
What is an LLM? This turns out to be a deceptively simple question, particularly as corporate marketing campaigns and platform design try to make AI appear, ironically, as natural as possible. Efforts to understand what an LLM is and does tend to center either the technical explanations of machine learning engineering or else they focus on AI's cultural significance and social effects. While these are important lines of inquiry, they skip over the fact that LLMs are perhaps most centrally technologies of language, constituting a new way that language happens and even reshaping what language itself is. Scholarship has only just begun to realize that LLMs need to be understood in terms of the kinds of literary theory that offer systematic accounts of our encounter with language, and that the models therefore make this area of literary theory newly relevant to daily life. In this theory-forward course, we will take the attempt to answer the question "What is an LLM?" as a motive for beginning to familiarize ourselves with some of the main touchpoints and texts of formalist literary theory. Our first goal will just be understanding - getting our heads around these theories and their potential application to LLMs; our second will be to begin developing our own, more nuanced ideas about AI and its implicit values. Students will leave the course equipped with language and concepts essential to thinking critically about AI and negotiating the twin siren songs of AI boosterism and AI doomerism with nuance and sensitivity.
Offered in Spring 2027 at Stanford University.