Ulrich Richtmeyer
Ulrich Richtmeyer is Professor of Media Culture Work at Fachhochschule Potsdam, where he leads the Kulturarbeit degree programme. He studied Fine Art at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, completing his doctorate in 2006 with a dissertation on Kant's aesthetics in the age of photography. His habilitation at the University of Potsdam in 2016 addressed Wittgenstein's image-thinking. A central long-term project is the DAAD-funded Vilém Flusser Summer Schools in Robion, co-organised with Baruch Gottlieb and Katerina Krtilova at Flusser's last place of residence, exploring digitalisation and the cultural consequences of technical images.
Articles of Ulrich Richtmeyer
Zögernde Intelligenz –Zeit im humanoiden und artifiziellen Schreiben
When the Chat GPT 3 model developed by Open AI was released to the public on November 28, 2022, a new era began in the development of artificial intelligence, which has been ongoing for over 75 years. While international experts and curious amateurs began to take a keen interest in the workings and results of AI instances, school and university students seized the opportunity in the first few weeks to produce unpopular text assignments with the help of Chat GPT (Tagesschau (2023 a, b, c). Even though prominent errors were still apparent at first, it quickly became clear that AI instances would soon be able to produce reasonably comprehensible texts on any topic. This is especially true for texts that attempt to persuade, such as marketing texts, job applications, concepts, and exposés, but also for the sprawling field of boring and rarely read administrative texts such as accountability reports, dossiers, applications, and minutes. Three years later, these artificial text productions have become even more convincing. They are being implemented silently in many applications and often used unnoticed. They now pose an unresolved problem for school and academic writing, and they have long since found their way into the scientific journalism of respected peer-reviewed journals and academic theses. In the following, I would like to discuss what this development means for the future of writing, referring to Flusser's book Die Schrift. Hat schreiben Zukunft? (1987). I am expressly not concerned here with comparing the quality of the differently generated texts, evaluating the possible intelligibility of machines, or the legal problems of copyright infringement and plagiarism. Instead, I would like to focus on the aspect of writing time, which primarily shapes the individual experience of humanoid writing, but will also determine the cultural status of writing in the future. After all, one of the two most important motives for using AI instances to write texts is the hoped-for time savings (cf. Hoffmann and Schmid 2025). The other motive is the hope for inspiration or, to put it more objectively, laziness in thinking.