Topic: These Strange New Minds – How AI Learned to Speak and What It Means
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Bogdan Franczyk, Professor of Information Management, Institute of Information Systems, Leipzig University
Time: Friday, March 27, 2026, 3:00 PM
Venue: TU Ilmenau, Faraday Lecture Hall, Weimarer Straße 32, access via Prof.-Schmidt-Straße
Admission: 5 euros
For a long time, language was considered the last untouchable stronghold of humanity’s unique status. We believed that weaving sentences, understanding nuances, and telling stories were inseparably linked to consciousness and mind. However, with the advent of modern large language models in artificial intelligence, this assumption has fundamentally changed. “These strange new minds” – artificial neural networks – have learned not only to imitate us in our own domain, but often to surpass us. But how could an architecture of numbers and probabilities achieve such mastery?
In his lecture as part of the TU Ilmenau Citizens’ Campus, Bogdan Franczyk, Professor of Information Management at Leipzig University, traces the technological evolution: from the early, still rather rigid attempts at rule-based language processing to the “Transformer moment” that enabled machines to capture context globally. In doing so, he highlights that AI does not “understand” in the way humans do, but instead conceives of language as a multidimensional mathematical space—a form of statistical mimicry so perfect that the boundary between tool and counterpart begins to blur. Language is demystified. Prof. Bogdan Franczyk concludes his lecture with an analysis of the societal consequences.
