Tipp-Ex, spell checkers, artificial intelligence: the future of scientific writing
Professor Noah Bubenhofer, Professor of German Linguistics
AI tools such as ChatGPT and Bard are currently being tried out extensively by the public at large and are the subject of passionate discussions. They can be used to generate texts, discuss questions or obtain help with software programming.
Do these tools represent such a fundamental change to the way in which we write that we need to take an entirely different approach to text at schools and universities, and are they rendering many forms of testing obsolete? Or, from a media history perspective, are they simply part of an unbroken line of writing aids that started with Tipp-Ex?
This lecture discusses the future of scientific writing from a media history and linguistic perspective, and outlines ideas for a new approach to text. (By the way, this announcement text was written without the aid of AI.)
As a linguist, Noah Bubenhofer (born 1976 in St. Gallen) is interested in semantics and pragmatics in culture and society, and pursues the following topics:
- Cultural linguistics synchronously and diachronically
- Corpus pragmatics/corpus linguistics
- Diagrammatics and knowledge theory
- Linguistic theory and digital linguistics
After studying German language and literature, communication and media studies, and sociology at the Universities of Basel and Freiburg im Breisgau (occasional courses), he held various positions in Switzerland and Germany:
Assistant Professor of German Linguistics with tenure track in the Department of German Studies at the University of Zurich, Professor of Digital Linguistics at the Institute of Language Competence, Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Winterthur, SNF Ambizione Habilitation fellow and project leader for Visual Linguistics at the Institute of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich, and many more.
Noah Bubenhofer is currently employed as Associate Professor of German Linguistics in the Department of German Studies at the University of Zurich.