Kirschenbaum lectures at Bodleian on 'textpocalypse' and AI

The open internet "is no longer composed primarily of writing written by human beings," Matthew Kirschenbaum will tell a Bodleian audience on 22 October 2026. Most of it, he argues, is "written by computers but also for other computers," tuned to game search results and social-media feeds.

Kirschenbaum, Commonwealth Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Professor of English at the University of Virginia, calls this "an epistemic shift in our relation to text as such," according to the Bodleian's event listing. He asks whether the trend signals the internet's end or merely fulfils "the material and capital logics that have governed the internet all along."

The hour-long talk, chaired by Bodley's Librarian Richard Ovenden and already fully booked, closes with a question aimed at its hosts: "Are there other futures still possible, and what can those of us – in libraries and universities – hope to do about it?"