Humans and their tools have always been entangled to such a degree that it is difficult to say where one ends and the other begins. This has also been the case for the involvement of writing tools, as media studies has pointed out repeatedly. But with the introduction of generative AI, a qualitative rather than just quantitative difference might have occurred. For only now and in retrospect does it become apparent that the origin of a piece of writing has been assumed to be human – an assumption that has now come under attack. This talk suggests that the doubt as to the written might not hold for long and will dissipate in the “post-artificial,” a state in which the difference between “natural” and artificial writing has come undone.

Hannes Bajohr is assistant professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on 20th century German thought, theories of the digital, and writing and AI. He most recently edited the volume Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities (London, Open Humanities Press, 2025).

Audrey Borowski is a research fellow with the Desirable Digitalisation project, a joint initiative of the Universities of Bonn and Cambridge that investigates how to design AI and other digital technologies in responsible ways. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and Aeon. Her first monograph Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant has been published by Princeton University Press: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691260747/leibniz-in-his-world