From linguistic generativity to projective generativity: Natural language, generative AI, and the circulation of meaning
By: Rossana De Angelis and Didier Tsala-Effa Guest Editors
| ARTICLE INFO: Volume: 11 Issue: 02:Winter 2025 ISSN: 2459-2943 DOI: 10.18680/hss.2025.0019 Pages: 5-24 Lic.: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 |
ABSTRACT
Generative AI is becoming increasingly present in our professional and personal lives. It is integrated into complex tasks (data analysis, synthesis of results, etc.) as well as simple tasks (writing an email, organising a menu, etc.). Sometimes it helps us understand the complexity of a phenomenon by facilitating access to content, and sometimes it eliminates the repetitiveness of an action by automating routine tasks. The introduction of these technologies into everyday life could have an impact similar to that of calculators in modernity (Urlaub and Dessein 2024). The emergence of generative AI in our lives forces us to take a stance on both machines and their uses. We can use generative AI to produce different objects: images (DALL-E 2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion…), texts (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Maia…), music (Jukebox, MusicLM…), code (Copilot…), etc. Interacting with machines, we define ourselves in return through the ways we use them. To use it consciously and critically, we need to understand the dynamics of these upheavals. This special issue of Punctum aims to foster a truly transdisciplinary dialogue on generativity as a linguistic, cognitive, semiotic, and technological phenomenon. By bringing together theories from semiotics, enunciative linguistics, cognitive chronogenesis, and AI, we aim to highlight both the continuities and discontinuities in the creation, transformation, and sharing of meaning.
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