Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series | The Poet and the City

Speaker:  Leah Lasell, St. John's College Tutor

At the beginning his essay, The Poet & The City, W. H. Auden writes that an astonishing number of young people, when asked what they want to do in life, say, “I want to be a writer.”  Young people recognize, continues Auden, that practically all workers have been reduced to laborers and that labor, as such, is slavery.  In writing, however, a person can hope to be his own master; a writer is free.  In the talk, with help from Auden and other 20th century philosophers of language, I will consider both the prosaist and poet, both prose and poetry, and consider how the ready access to outputs from large language models illuminates what young people aspire to be–and what they would never want to be–when they say, “I want to be a writer.”

This lecture is part of the Graduate Institute Summer Lecture Series - The theme of the series is “Liberal Education in the Age of the LLM.” Nearly every day brings news of “artificial intelligence’s” latest triumph or latest threat. Lost amid the noisy celebrations and denunciations – are the philosophical questions embedded in the very idea of an “artificial intelligence.” Can there be an intelligence that is “artificial”? And if so, how is such intelligence related to human intelligence and human thinking? This lecture series brings together a group of faculty at St John’s College, joined by a colleague in the Computer Science Department at the United States Naval Academy, to examine the foundational questions posed by artificial intelligence. St. John’s is a particularly fine place to host such a series because its program of study is steeped in reflections about the nature of thinking itself, from authors like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Hegel, and many others. Indeed, St. John’s is uniquely positioned to contribute to and enrich the national conversation about artificial intelligence precisely because it offers an occasion for a reflection upon the foundational works – in philosophy, mathematics, and computation – that contemporary “artificial intelligence” has developed out of. The lecture series is, in that sense, an invitation to step back from news of the latest triumph or threat and to reflect more generally about human thinking and human writing and how it is – or is not – like that done by computers.