10 years after the initial idea, Artificial Humanities is here! Thanks so much to all who have preordered it. I hope you enjoy reading it and find this research approach as generative as I do. More to come!

The Boston Dynamics dog gets all the attention and has some great uses (measuring gases, accessing inaccessible places, disasters). Another highlight is the exoskeleton behind it, which has been used for walking by 800 completely paralyzed people since 2012, through insurance

One of the main linguistic conferences on phonology has just started. It's such a special moment, because who would have thought that a poster on whale phonology would be presented at the Annual Meeting on Phonology. @projectceti.bsky.social

Thanks for the shoutout @hannesbajohr.de! Read Hannes's interview here: artshumanities.berkeley.edu/news/post-ar...

The peer reviews were stellar! We're excited to see the book out in the world

How to model learning of Mandarin tones with no supervision, from raw sound, with a realistic model of human language learning? The model learns the four tones (male only near perfectly) and also replicates stages of tone learning in language acquisition. What is more difficult to learn for children

A news feature in Nature reporting on our paper that shows whale vocalizations are analogous to human vowels and diphthongs. The paper accepted for publication as of today @projectceti.bsky.social

our work with @metahaven.bsky.social

Modern Fiction Studies is sponsoring a conference on “Cultural AI” at Purdue, to be followed by a special issue. @aarthivadde.bsky.social, @richardjeanso.bsky.social, N Katherine Hayles, @mattwilkens.bsky.social , @mellymeldubs.bsky.social, and I will be there later this week.

The peer reviews were stellar! We're excited to see the book out in the world

Thanks for the shoutout @hannesbajohr.de! Read Hannes's interview here: artshumanities.berkeley.edu/news/post-ar...

Honored to be featured in DIE ZEIT, Germany’s leading weekly. The piece explores the uniqueness (or not) of human language and spotlights our infant‑like, more realistic alternatives to LLMs as well as our work on metalinguistic abilities of LLMs.

Meta's No Language Left Behind initiative. It does help if the name of your language comes early in the alphabet...

Say it again for those in the back: HUMANITIES USUALLY SUBSIDIZE STEM at most R1s. Yes we have receipts.

When you’re big you can play the big violin

In Maja Dolores Šubic’s kingdom, under prefecture of the queen cat Beyoncé.

Point of comparison: the MLA and CCC issued a report 2 years ago that is quite a bit more willing to recommend engagement with AI. I don’t think it got anything like the negative response AHA is getting (at least on this website). Suggests positions on this have hardened.

A perfect place to grow up. Small and quaint, full of history, artists and artisans, close to the capital, surrounded by farms.

Being made

Each string instrument has a character. It might respond well to the player, or not so much. The instrument is not replaceable in the same way as, say, the piano. And the price range is close to infinite. Are other instruments like that or are strings the most peculiar?

“In the Middle Ages, God stood at the top of the value pyramid; the Renaissance elevated humankind to that position. Now we have reached a point once again where the uniqueness—or singularity—of the human being is coming into question.” In Slovenian newspaper of record:

For the first time, metalinguistics and recursion are not exclusively human abilities. Large language models can do them too. This research is an example of “behavioral interpretability” of LLMs—using prompting to understand inner representations of AI. news.berkeley.edu/2025/07/14/a...

Last week, we had a fantastic conference on AI and storytelling at the @badw.de, co-organized by myself and @ninabegus.bsky.social. You can read my own, naturally very subjective, summary of the event here: www.christoph-heilig.de/en/post/stor...

Letzte Woche hatten wir eine fantastische interdisziplinäre Veranstaltung an der @badw.de zum Erzählen und KI! Hier gibt es ein paar Eindrücke von mir. www.christoph-heilig.de/post/erz%C3%... Mit u.a. @ninabegus.bsky.social, @begus.bsky.social und @julianschroeter.bsky.social

Danes zjutraj na Valu 202, Jezikanje o umetni inteligenci in jeziku z @begus.bsky.social

Table of Contents for 🤖 Artificial Humanities 🎭

Was excited to see von Kempelen’s speech device from ca. 1800 that “spoke” French, Italian, and Latin! Many automata of that time were tricks: the famous Mechanical Turk and the “invisible women” who spoke in lieu of the machine. An excerpt is from my book Artificial Humanities

Had a perfect birthday with these AI + narrative scholars from LMU

Today, we had our workshop on AI and storytelling! It was incredibly stimulating! If you're talking about AI and not thinking about fiction and the humanities, you're missing out on something truly important! And yes, the pictures paint a realistic image of just how much fun we had!

Our artificial baby language learner (fiwGAN) and its latent space exhibited @berggruen.org in collaboration with Antikythera @metahaven.bsky.social @ninabegus.bsky.social Benjamin Bratton

I am very much looking forward to tomorrow! @badw.de @begus.bsky.social @ninabegus.bsky.social

My talk on building realistic models of human language and how AI interpretability can help us decode unknown communications. @asa-news.bsky.social Modeling Learning of Acoustic Data in Humans and Non-Humans with Interpretable Deep Learning vimeo.com/1095669983

ArtHum book's pre-splash from last year's Scientific American www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-...

The humanities can reshape AI and computer science. How to imagine new realities is the next big thing. Fiction, comparative literature, linguistics ... will offer their tools. Excited to discuss this at Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

We are running a workshop and AI and narratives on June 26 at the Bavarian Academy! Please register by June 19 at [email protected]

This world, captured in all its depth by the one and only Janez Ramoveš

ars.rtvslo.si/podkast/podo... on fiction and technology at Radio Ars

a hut at Mt Črna Prst :)

Hey, the dataset is out now. A million books: huggingface.co/datasets/ins... H/t @naitian.org for the link

Truly wonderful to return to the classroom in which we spent a majority of our undergrad and get together with our cohorts and professors!

I am very much looking forward to co-hosting this event at the @badw.de on June 26. I will also present insights from my own research on narration and AI storytellers. @julianschroeter.bsky.social, professor for digital literary studies at the LMU, will likewise contribute.

We are running a workshop and AI and narratives on June 26 at the Bavarian Academy! Please register by June 19 at [email protected]

Had to hit my 30s to gain an appreciation for flowers. Sometimes you're a late bloomer. Here's a little something to brighten your day!

Hannes Bajohr (@hannesbajohr.de), Nina Beguš (@ninabegus.bsky.social), Peter Fackeldey (@pfackeldey.bsky.social), Yanpeng Song, Nicole Starosielski, Clancy Wilmott, Tianxiu Yu, and Peter Zhou 🙏🙏🙏 #DataScience #AI #SocietyAndTechnology

The party is at the German department! Have you seen all these German profs doing fun stuff on AI and language and the planetary...?!

the hamlet of Grant in Baška Grapa, Slovenia photo Andreja Peklaj

Whale vocalizations not only resemble human vowels, but also behave like ones! We previously discovered that sperm whales have analogues to human vowels. In a new preprint, we analyze linguistic behavior of whale vowels.