Inverse Awareness and Large Language Model (LLM)-Generated Fictions

LCAL Inaugural Annual Lecture, Professor N. Katherine Hayles

Monday 12 October, 4pm. The Council Room, Hotel Indigo, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HL

This event will be free to attend, with complimentary wine and canapes for post-lecture discussion.

Sign up here: LCAL Inaugural Annual Lecture with Professor N. Katherine Hayles – Fill in form

“What we can no longer afford is the illusion that computational media simply perform calculations, devoid of interpretations, anticipations, and meaning making. It seems obvious to me that (short of environmental collapse or catastrophic global war) our journey into symbiosis with computational media, which has already begun, is likely to accelerate in the coming decades […] Our best hope for navigating these tricky waters is to start with a clear-eyed view of how human umwelten overlap with and differ from those of the nonhuman others, including biological organisms and computational media. Understanding computational media as capable of meaning-making practices contributes to a philosophy of ecological relationality because it breaks the illusion that only humans are able to create, disseminate, and understand meaning. Moreover, it emphasizes that computational media are involved in intense feedback loops with humans, affecting everything from how human cognitions perform in the world to the (infra)structures of human sociality, economics, politics, and much more”

(Extract from N. Katherine Hayles, 2025, ‘Bacteria to AI: Human Futures With our Nonhuman Symbionts’, University of Chicago Press).

The Leverhulme Centre for Algorithmic Life invites you to the inaugural annual lecture. Join us as we welcome Professor N. Katherine Hayles, distinguished research professor of English at UCLA and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of literature at Duke University. Professor Hayles has a unique influence on contemporary thought in the age of artificial intelligence. Among a vast body of work, her books reach across the arts and sciences in ways that few others have achieved: from her 1990 Chaos Unbound: Orderly Disorder in Literature and Science and 1999 How we Became Posthuman, to her 2005 My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, her scholarship anticipates remarkably the interplay of literature and science in a world of deep neural networks and generative AI. The questions she raises in the 2015 How we Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis and 2017 Unthought: the Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious are crucial in today’s debates on the place of AI in cognition and decision. In this talk Professor Hayles will address the generative capacities of large language models as “inverse awareness”, making a powerful intervention in some of the most important questions of our times.

The lecture will be introduced and chaired by Professor Louise Amoore, director of the LCAL.