{"id":30176,"date":"2026-10-30T18:00:45","date_gmt":"2026-10-30T17:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/?p=30176"},"modified":"2026-10-30T21:33:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-30T20:33:14","slug":"of-machines-and-masters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/voelkerrechtsblog.org\/de\/of-machines-and-masters\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Machines and Masters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Valentin Jeutner<\/a>, one of the co-founders of V\u00f6lkerrechtsblog, reminded us in his inaugural lecture at Lund University that, in June 1958, addressing the University of Cambridge, Dag Hammarskj\u00f6ld observed<\/a> that humanity was living \u201cin a time of technical achievement which threatens its own masters with destruction.\u201d Speaking against the backdrop of the Cold War and the nuclear threat, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations captured an anxiety that reaches far beyond his historical moment: that the technologies humans create may come to escape their control and fundamentally alter the conditions of human existence.
\n<\/p>\n

Almost seven decades later, his words resonate anew amid the rapid proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (genAI). Of course, the analogy has its limits<\/a>: the existential threat of nuclear destruction and the transformations brought about by genAI are not directly comparable<\/a>, even if their future implications remain uncertain. Yet, familiar questions about the relationship between human agency and technological development have returned with renewed urgency. Are we still the masters of our machines? As technologies begin to perform activities we have long considered distinctly human, they may transform not only what we do, but also how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.<\/p>\n

For (international legal) scholarship, these questions have acquired particular urgency as genAI increasingly enters the practices of research and writing. Yet the debate concerns more than whether and under what conditions such tools should be used. It also invites us to reconsider notions of scholarly authorship, intellectual agency, and the production of knowledge.<\/p>\n

In his essay Against the Suspicion of Machines<\/a>, Jean d\u2019Aspremont challenges the suspicion surrounding machine-generated academic writing. He reminds us that scholarship has never been the unmediated creation of an autonomous author, but has always depended on technologies, conventions, collaborations, and other forms of mediation. Distinguishing between the delegation of \u201cthought\u201d and the delegation of \u201cinscription\u201d, he questions whether the involvement of machines in producing scholarly texts should, in itself, be a cause for concern.<\/p>\n

His intervention provides a valuable provocation, but it also invites further reflection. Can inscription and thought really be separated so neatly? To what extent do the means through which we write also shape the ways in which we think? And what changes when machines become involved not only in formulating scholarly arguments, but also in responding to and developing them further?<\/p>\n

The work of sociologist Elena Esposito offers another way of approaching these questions. In her book Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence <\/a><\/em>and her more recent reflections <\/a>on large language models as communication partners, Esposito asks whether AI \u2013 Artificial Intelligence<\/em> \u2013 really is the most illuminating framework for understanding these technologies in the first place. Asking whether machines are \u201eintelligent\u201c tends to measure them against human capacities for thinking and understanding, eliciting questions of rivalry, replacement, and control. Rather than asking whether machines think or understand in ways comparable to humans, she proposes approaching them as forms of Artificial Communication<\/em>: systems that generate responses which acquire meaning through their use and interpretation in social interactions, without presupposing that the systems themselves understand what they communicate in the way human interlocutors do.<\/p>\n

Taking a step back and remaining open to shifts in perspective, such as the move from intelligence to communication proposed by Esposito, may help us ask different questions about the role of generative systems in (international legal) scholarship. How do such systems shape the questions we ask, the arguments we encounter, and the possibilities of thought available to us? Scholarship has always been relational, shaped by exchanges with texts, colleagues, and intellectual traditions. Yet not all forms of mediation are equivalent. Generative systems may become interlocutors in scholarly exchanges, even though their responses are produced under conditions fundamentally different from those of dialogue among human scholars. What happens to epistemic authority when a system can generate convincing scholarly claims without being accountable for their meaning or justification? And who bears responsibility for the knowledge claims that emerge from these interactions?<\/p>\n

Yet the implications of these interactions extend beyond questions of epistemic authority and responsibility. As Vito De Lucia has recently argued<\/a>, genAI also raises questions about the human experience and practice of knowing and understanding itself. Scholarship is not simply the production of plausible propositions or polished texts. It involves uncertainty, hesitation, disagreement, and the difficult encounter with ideas that challenge what we may have come tobelieve. The apparent effortlessness of machine-generated answers may obscure the struggles through which knowledge and judgment develop. At the same time, the seemingly neutral voice of AI may reproduce dominant epistemic assumptions while concealing the highly particular histories, interests, and material conditions from which its outputs emerge.<\/p>\n

These concerns acquire particular significance in international legal scholarship, where the production and recognition of knowledge have long been shaped by unequal relations of power, linguistic hierarchies, and competing claims to universality. Whose intellectual traditions and understandings of international law are reflected in the materials from which generative systems learn? Which perspectives become more visible, and which are at risk of being marginalized or rendered invisible? Might these technologies open up new possibilities for participation and intellectual exchange, or will they only reinforce existing hierarchies under the appearance of universally accessible knowledge? And what does it mean to speak of the democratization of scholarship when the infrastructures through which knowledge is increasingly mediated remain concentrated in the hands of a few powerful actors?<\/p>\n

None of these questions can be settled simply by determining whether machines are \u201eintelligent\u201c, whether they can properly be called authors, or whether their use should be permitted or prohibited. Their significance also depends on the scholarly norms, practices, and institutions within which they operate, as well as on the forms of intellectual agency and responsibility that their interactions enable or constrain.<\/p>\n

Perhaps another encounter with machines can help us approach these questions in an altogether different spirit. In 1959, just one year after Hammarskj\u00f6ld\u2019s Cambridge address, the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely presented his M\u00e9ta-Matics<\/a>: peculiar, deliberately unruly machines that produced abstract drawings. Where Hammarskj\u00f6ld warned that humanity\u2019s technological creations might escape their masters, Tinguely seemed, with playful irreverence, to ask a different set of questions: Whose mastery are we speaking of? Tinguely\u2019s, as the maker of the machine? That of the participant who set it in motion? Or does it lie somewhere in between, in the unpredictable process through which the drawing comes into being? And, perhaps more fundamentally, was mastery ever quite the point?<\/p>\n

Tinguely\u2019s M\u00e9ta-Matics<\/a> did not resolve these questions. Instead, they made them visible, inviting curiosity, participation, and reflection. Their playful absurdity challenged established understandings of artistic authorship without demanding a definitive answer about where human creativity ends and mechanical production begins. And while the machines\u2019 operations remained shaped by their construction and the circumstances of their use, their results could not be fully reduced to the intentions of any single participant.<\/p>\n

It is in something of this spirit that we convene this symposium. Our ambition is not simply to debate the promises and perils of genAI, but to use this moment of technological transformation to examine the practices, assumptions, and structures through which international legal scholarship produces disciplinary knowledge. D\u2019Aspremont\u2019s essay provides a provocation and a point of departure, not a framework that confines the discussion. Equally, the perspectives outlined here are invitations to further inquiry above all else. Among others, we welcome contributions that question established understandings of scholarly authorship, originality, intellectual labour, epistemic authority, and the purposes of academic inquiry itself. We are also interested in contributions that question the very conceptual vocabulary through which genAI is conceived and discussed, including whether intelligence, communication, creativity, or mastery adequately captures the transformations at stake.<\/p>\n

The conditions of international legal knowledge production are neither static nor uniform, and their transformation is not determined by technological developments alone. They are shaped by the individual and collective choices scholars, editors, universities, publishers, technology companies, and wider intellectual communities make, as well as by the structures of power within which those choices are situated. Like Tinguely\u2019s machines, this symposium is therefore conceived not to produce a definitive image of the future of international legal scholarship in times of genAI, but to set a process in motion: one of sustained, open, and public debate, attentive to divergent experiences and practices, critical perspectives, and possibilities not yet anticipated, and inviting collective participation in shaping the conditions under which knowledge is, and ought to be, produced.<\/p>\n

This space remains open, and we continue to invite<\/a> contributions!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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