Keynote: The Différance Engine: Large Language Models and Deconstruction.

By David J. Gunkel (Northern Illinois University)

In this keynote presentation, David J. Gunkel challenges the familiar characterization of transformer-based language models as stochastic parrots, blurry JPEGs of the web, bullshit machines, or the end of human writing. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, he proposes a radically different way of understanding these technologies—not as failed speakers or defective communicators, but as writing machines that expose and unsettle the logocentric assumptions concerning language, meaning, intention, and authorship that structure contemporary debates about artificial intelligence.