What is an artifice? The precarities of Culbertson’s two distinctions on generative AI

Grimwood, Tom ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8099-6191 (2025) What is an artifice? The precarities of Culbertson’s two distinctions on generative AI. Journal of Applied Hermeneutics .

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Abstract

Culbertson's recent paper within the Journal of Applied Hermeneutics offered two distinctions at work in the reading and understanding of Natural Learning Processing. This paper was a signigicant articulation of a general hermeneutic response to the prospect of generative AI and its challenges for interpretation. But it also raised some nagging questions on whether there is a risk that we settle too quickly on the promotion of close reading and the aspirations of “thinking with others” in dialogical open-ness, and in doing so also settle a little too quickly on what the object of the hermeneutic encounter is, at the expense of other possible dialogues, or traditions, at work? This paper argues that a dimension at work in the debate over generative AI often missed from hermeneutic discussions is that of the artifice. It the dimension of the artifice, as an interpretative element of the “artificial” at work in AI; not as a critique of Culbertson’s two distinctions, but rather to suggest a certain precarity to their resoluteness, a precarity which further research would benefit from.

Item Type:	Article
Journal / Publication Title:	Journal of Applied Hermeneutics
Publisher:	Canadian Hermeneutic Institute
ISSN:	1927-4416
Departments:	Institute of Health > Psychology and Psychological Therapies Health and Society Knowledge Exchange (HASKE)
Additional Information:	Professor Tom Grimwood, PhD, Professor of Social Philosophy, University of Cumbria, UK. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Depositing User:	Tom Grimwood
Date Deposited:	18 Jul 2025 09:11
Last Modified:	06 Oct 2025 08:00
URI:	https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/8969

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