New in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · October 2026 · Open access
Alon Friedman (University of South Florida) and Martin Thellefsen (University of Copenhagen)
Meaning, knowledge and interpretation in artificial intelligence
Digital semiotics studies how computational systems produce signs, how those signs acquire meaning and authority, and how they shape the knowledge practices of the people who read them.
New in JASIST · 13 October 2026 · Open access
The ultimate forgery: a semiotic deconstruction of large language models as engines of simulated selfhood
Latest notes
All notesWhat is the interpretant of a generated text?
A fluent paragraph has a sign and an apparent object. The semiotic work happens in the third term, and the third term lives in the reader.
7 min readThe ultimate forgery, in brief
[Plain-language summary of the JASIST article: the claim, the method, and what it means for readers of generated text.]
5 min readReading a chatbot citation as a sign
A generated reference looks like a catalog record. One close reading asks what authorizes it and what a reader does with it.
9 min readThe problem
Generated content takes on the formal marks of human expression: structure, coherence, authority. It is produced without intention, lived experience, cultural memory or sustained membership in an interpretive community. Digital semiotics treats the consequences as theoretical problems with practical stakes for how knowledge is organized, trusted and used.
- How is knowledge represented when signification is increasingly automated?
- How is interpretive authority assigned to machine-generated outputs?
- What is lost when meaning is detached from human continuity and context?
Research strands
01
AI and meaning
Language models, simulated selfhood and the semiotic status of generated text.
02
Knowledge organization
Domain analysis, classification and catalog records in an age of machinic interpretation.
03
Visual semiotics
Iconicity, metaphor and data visualization read through Peirce.
04
Peircean method
Speculative grammar, methodeutic, and Peircean analysis in code and in the classroom.
The book · In progress
Meaning Without Memory
Peirce, Digital Semiotics, and the Epistemic Limits of Artificial Intelligence
Meaning Without Memory is a philosophical account of how signs create meaning and how meaning becomes knowledge in the age of artificial intelligence. Its central argument is that contemporary AI systems produce signs without semiosis, the interpretive process through which signs come to mean. They generate fluent linguistic, visual, and multimodal outputs, but they do not themselves sustain the interpretive memory, domain accountability, or historical continuity through which signs become meaningful and knowledge-bearing.
- Publisher
- Under negotiation
- Chapters
- Drafted
- Expected
- 2027
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