This theoretical article moves beyond representationalist conceptions of objectivity to examine deeper challenges posed by LLMs in collective knowledge production. While LLMs are often criticized for bias, hallucination, and generating “bullshit” that misrepresents reality, such critiques are too narrow to account for how LLMs transform the sociotechnical practices of knowledge-making. Drawing on Barad’s performative account, we argue that objectivity should be understood not as fixed representa…
Read moreThis theoretical article moves beyond representationalist conceptions of objectivity to examine deeper challenges posed by LLMs in collective knowledge production. While LLMs are often criticized for bias, hallucination, and generating “bullshit” that misrepresents reality, such critiques are too narrow to account for how LLMs transform the sociotechnical practices of knowledge-making. Drawing on Barad’s performative account, we argue that objectivity should be understood not as fixed representations of the world but as ongoing ethical and epistemological boundaries emerging through complex intra-acting agencies. We offer a relational analysis of LLM production, framing it as a series of transformations between technical artifacts: from Internet to dataset, dataset to base model, and base model to instruction-tuned model. Each transformation introduces exclusions that enact epistemological, computational, and discursive boundaries. We conclude by proposing “artifactual literacy,” a critical awareness of how LLMs function as contingent artifacts mediating the evolving boundaries of objective knowledge.
