"Language and Image Minus Cognition." Leif Weatherby on LLMs

Summary

by Robin Manley Leif Weatherby is an Associate Professor of German at New York University, where he directs the Digital Theory Lab. Robin Manley spoke with Dr. Weatherby about his latest book, Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), which argues that Large Language Models (LLMs) have effected a separation of cognition from language and computation in a form that corresponds to earlier structuralist theories. Robin Manley: In the introduction to Language Machines, you argue that today’s prevailing frameworks for AI research all share a common theoretical mistake, which you call “remainder humanism.” This goes for the AI-skeptical linguistic arguments made by scholars like Emily Bender and Noam Chomsky, but also for the more social-scientific literature on AI bias and ethics, and even for the otherwise quite-opposed tradition of AI risk and alignment research. What is remainder humanism, and how does it limit these different approaches to thinking about LLMs? Leif Weatherby: Remainder humanism is the term I use for us painting ourselves into a corner theoretically. The operation is just that we say, “machines can do x, but we can do it better or more truly.” This sets up a kind of John-Henry-versus-machine competition that guides the analysis. With ChatGPT’s release, that kind of lazy thinking, which had prevailed since the early days of AI critique, especially as motivated by the influential phenomenological work of Hubert Dreyfus, hit a dead end. If machines can produce smooth, fluent, and chatty language, it causes everyone with a stake in linguistic humanism to freak out. Bender retreats into the position that the essence of language is “speaker’s intent”; Chomsky claims that language is actually cognition, not words (he’s been doing this since 1957; his NYT op-ed from early 2023 uses examples from Syntactic Structures without adjustment). But the other side are also remainder humanists. These are the...