Language Machine as Culture-Forming Medium

Review of Roberto Simanowski: "Sprachmaschinen. Wie Künstliche Intelligenz Autorschaft, Wahrheit und Souveraenität redefiniert"

Abstract

This review analyzes Roberto Simanowski’s book “Sprachmaschinen/Language Machines” (2025), which conceptualizes Large Language Models (LLMs) as culture-constituting media that transform human self-understanding and relations to the world. Simanowski pursues a media-philosophical approach, arguing with reference to Martin Heidegger that language machines are not mere technical artifacts but instances of a fundamental shift in authorship, truth, and subjectivity. His central concepts – „prevention librarian,“ „world text,“ „layers of disempowerment“ – condense the diagnosis of epistemic disempowerment through statistical truth production. As a counter-program, Simanowski develops a „philosophical media literacy“ that moves beyond instrumental application toward critical reflection on the medial conditions of knowledge itself. The review acknowledges this position as a productive provocation while identifying critical gaps: a latent technological determinism, the underexposure of emancipatory AI potentials, and the absence of non-Western perspectives. Nevertheless, the work offers indispensable impulses for media philosophy and media education in engaging with the cultural dimension of algorithmic language processing.