ORCID

0009-0005-0290-5799

Keywords

Large Language Models (LLMs), Generative AI, Misrecognition, Spectacle, Cultural Materialism, Ideology

Abstract

Language is a conceptual process of meaning-making as well as a social construction as defined by Saussure, Bakhtin, and Lacan. Large Language Models (LLMs) engage with neither process and instead present language as a finished and consumable product which undermines its fundamental aspects. The difference between representing language through probability and its structural components instead of its more inherent qualities is not a pointless distinction. This paper utilizes Narcissus as a central metaphor to show how people misread the outputs of LLMs as language which imparts to those reflected words meaning on par with our own conceptualizations of reality. People see a simulacrum of language and assume intelligence on par with or greater than our own. Through a cultural materialistic framework that draws on Marx, Debord, Althusser, and Gramsci this thesis examines how that misrecognition produces material harm across three areas: academically, as students cognitively de-load and never learn key skills while institutions encourage adoption of AI tools, professionally, as used as a smoke screen for layoff and offshoring, and interpersonally, as these tools are used as a salve for loneliness and companionship. These three areas work together as an ideological tool being sold as an inevitability by state and private for-profit institutions that care more about propping up a stagnant economy than the actual outcomes of this forced adoption. We misrecognize their outputs as language which is the foundation that allows private interest to continue propagating the spectacle as future usefulness.

Completion Date

2026

Semester

Spring

Committee Chair

Grajeda, Anthony

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

English

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

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