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

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.