Language,
the Self,
& AI.

In few realms of human activity has the impact of artificial intelligence been felt as immediately and visibly as in language. For many people, AI and language technology are now synonymous — from neural machine translation systems like DeepL to large language model interfaces such as ChatGPT and Claude, technologies that achieved some of the fastest adoption rates in the history of communication media.

Yet beneath the surface of this remarkable efficiency lies a set of urgent and unresolved questions. The capacity of AI systems to generate fluent multilingual output at scale has made them central actors in contemporary information ecosystems — shaping which voices are amplified, which varieties of language are standardised, and which forms of knowledge are rendered invisible. Issues of bias, linguistic inequality, and epistemic asymmetry are not incidental features of these tools; they are structurally embedded in how they are designed and deployed.

Language is inseparable from how human beings frame experience, construct identity, and interact with the world. A technology that so faithfully mimics communication — the very basis of human identity and connection — demands rigorous, multidisciplinary scrutiny.

If language is, as Heidegger put it, the “house of being,” then those who work with it bear a clear ethical responsibility in the age of AI.

That responsibility is to resist purely utilitarian considerations and to preserve the capacity of language to reveal, nuance, and sustain human understanding. AI systems, by design, tend toward standardisation, optimisation, and probabilistic reproduction — risking the flattening of ambiguity, the erosion of minority expressions, and the privileging of dominant linguistic patterns. The task is not to reject technology outright, but to prevent the “house” from being converted into a purely functional structure: to ensure that language remains a space where meaning can emerge, rather than merely be processed.

Language, the Self, and AI is the inaugural symposium of LaTeR Lab, a new research centre at the Scuola Superiore per Mediatori Linguistici di Pisa (SSML Pisa) dedicated to the intersection of language, technology, and professional practice. It is conceived as a genuinely interdisciplinary event — as relevant to translators and interpreters as to computer scientists, and as relevant to ethicists and policy-makers as to linguists and educators.