Hengstberger Preis Award winner 2025
Generative AI as a Cultural Phenomenom
Ever since OpenAI published "ChatGPT" in November 2022, generative AI has become ubiquitous in everyday life. The advantages, we are told, outweigh the challenges, which themselves are actually opportunities.
At the same time, studies have shown that the grand promises of generative AI have not yet been met. If its actual capabilities are so sobering, why has generative AI not been disenchanted yet? Why does it remain so popular across different sectors? The basic hypothesis of this symposium is that generative AI and the discourse surrounding it are primarily a cultural phenomenon, which needs to be analysed as such. To do so, we will bring together perspectives from literary and cultural studies, history and philosophy of technology, religious studies, art history, education, and ethics.
The symposium will examine the roots of current discourses through the history of AI as well as explorations into the science fiction narratives which have expressed and shaped our fears and hopes related to AI for decades, and which are an integral part of its perception today. Which qualities and characteristics are attached to generative AI? To what extent are these religious or otherwise spiritual, and what role does this play culturally and for the way we as human view ourselves? How, on the other hand, are machines anthropomorphised, and what are the consequences of this on trust in automatically generated statements? The aim of this symposium is to approach this cultural phenomenon as such, and examine the various motivations, catalysts, and effects from this point of view. To round out the symposium, we will also take a look at very concrete fields and discuss what effects generative AI can have in education in schools as well as universities, and what its implications are for these systems. Generative AI has become a complex social phenomenon, for which an interdisciplinary approach is particularly promising.
Dr. Annika Elstermann
Anglistisches Seminar
Kettengasse 12
69117 Heidelberg
annika.elstermann@as.uni-heidelberg.de
Veranstaltungstermin: 03.06. - 04.06.2026