The project Assisted Thinking pursues two lines of inquiry: (1) writing the history of AI as a genealogy of thinking machines from the Baroque to the present, and (2) using insights gained from this genealogy to critically examine the use of language in current Large Language Models (LLMs). The project’s guiding questions probe assistance and creativity in intellectual work—two distinct trajectories anchored within the project’s historical and methodological lines of research—by examining the architecture, modes of interaction, and language use of both historical and current thinking machines.

Our core concept of »assistance« takes the agential relationship between human and AI to be an unequal but distributed phenomenon, circumventing the fruitless discourse of the machinic replacement of human beings. The assisting device acts as a moderator and facilitator of human ideas and knowledge production, and it is aimed at »creativity,« understood here as the productive outcome of a shared interaction rather than as the characteristic of a single participant.

Two foci elucidate these concepts from different historical and conceptual angles. While the »Deep History of AI« investigates the assistive function of »intellectual furnishings« like desks and writing cabinets from the Baroque to the present, the focus on prompts as the interface between human and machine examines the change of language use while becoming both a medium of assistance and an agent in the creative interaction with the technology.

The range of the disciplinary and methodological backgrounds together with a close collaboration with our partners from the history of science, media studies, and computer sciences aims to contributing to Critical AI Studies, an innovative field which just starts to emerge.

Markus Krajewski (Principal Investigator, University of Basel), Hannes Bajohr (Cooperation Partner, Berkeley University), Yannick Nepomuk Fritz (PhD Candidate, University of Basel), Yanick Antonelli (Research Assistant, University of Basel).

The project has been funded with the generous support of The NOMIS Foundation, Zurich. The project will start work in spring 2025 with a duration of three years.