From Talking Tools to Metahumans: Social Interaction, Semiotic Skill, and the Authority of AI Chatbots, with Webb Keane

The more sophisticated the semiotic skills of chatbots trained on Large Language Models become, the more that they can seem to harbor uncanny insights whose sources are inexplicable, possibly even divine — metahumans. Treating Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a metahuman is just an extreme case of something more general, the projection of authority onto enigmatic technology. This authority emerges from the pragmatics of social interaction. What makes this character of AI seem intuitively real is due, in part, to the ways humans and metahumans address one another on semiotically unequal grounds.

Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is a social-cultural and linguistic anthropologist whose writings cover social and cultural theory and the ethnography and history of Southeast Asia. Keane’s interests include semiotics, language, religion, ethics, and technology. His books include Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (1997), Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (2007), Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (2016), and Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination (2025).

This event is presented by the Walter H. Capps Center, and co-sponsored by the Department of Religious Studies, Department of Anthropology, Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning, Center for Responsible Machine Learning, and Mellichamp Initiative in Mind & Machine Intelligence.