This seminar investigates the entangled histories, present tensions, and speculative futures of alphabets and artificial intelligence. From the symbolic foundations of written language to the algorithmic architectures that drive machine learning, alphabets and AI share a deep conceptual affinity: both transform the world through systems of encoded signification. This seminar invites scholars to explore how alphabetic writing systems intersect with AI in literary, linguistic, philosophical, and cultural contexts.  While the seminar foregrounds “alphabets” as a conceptual anchor, we use the term capaciously to include other graphemic systems such as syllabaries (e.g., Japanese kana), abjads (e.g., Arabic), abugidas (e.g., Devanagari), logographies (e.g., Chinese characters), and hybrid or constructed scripts. We welcome discussions that critically examine how such diverse orthographic traditions are represented, distorted, or erased in AI training corpora and natural language processing pipelines.
  How do different writing systems—alphabetic, syllabic, logographic—shape the ways AI parses and produces language? How does the history of alphabetization influence the design of large language models and their biases? What might comparative philology, paleography, or typographic history contribute to current debates in AI ethics, cognition, and aesthetics?
  Comparative projects that examine AI across multiple scripts, languages, or media are especially encouraged, including work that bridges Europhone and non-Europhone contexts or explores scriptural plurality in multilingual corpora.  We are particularly interested in proposals that approach the topic from a comparative, translingual, or transmedial perspective. Possible areas of focus include:

• The algorithmic politics of OCR and NLP across different scripts
• Alphabetic dominance in digital language infrastructures
• AI-generated literature and the limits of orthographic creativity
• Indigenous, non-Latin, or endangered scripts in AI contexts
• Semiotic theory and machine reading
• The aesthetics of AI-generated typography or handwriting
• The role of alphabetization in dataset curation and linguistic hierarchies
• AI and translation/transcription
• AI and theories of value
• The ethics and politics of translation in the age of LLMs
• The critical discussion of LLMs' ontologies
• The future of translation studies in the context of the growing use of LLMs

  We welcome papers from literary studies, media theory, linguistics, digital humanities, history of writing, AI ethics, and related fields. This seminar aims to bring together scholars working at the intersection of historical textual practices and emerging computational paradigms, opening new avenues for comparative literature in the age of artificial intelligence.
  This seminar has been merged with another titled “The Politics and Ethics of Translation in the Age of Large Language Models,” expanding the discussion to include the long history of machine translation and the role of translation as mediation between languages, cultures, and knowledge. Together, the merged seminar explores how large language models revive early dreams of a universal language while reinscribing hierarchies of linguistic and cultural power, inviting dialogue across literary studies, translation theory, media theory, and philosophy. In addition to the listed co-organizers, this seminar has also been organized by Alwin Franke.