PERSON
Hannes Bajohr
German philosopher and literary theorist (b. 1984), simultaneously a leading contemporary scholar of Judith Shklar and a major theorist of AI and language — whose dual expertise makes him uniquely positioned to extend Shklar's framework into the specific terrain of large language models.
Hannes Bajohr is a German philosopher, literary scholar, and author whose unusual combination of scholarly commitments makes him the foremost contemporary bridge between Shklarian political theory and the critical analysis of artificial intelligence. His scholarly work on Shklar — including translations, edited volumes, and interpretive essays — has contributed to her twenty-first-century revival within German-language political theory. Simultaneously, his parallel work on AI and language has produced some of the most philosophically sophisticated critical analysis of large language models available, emphasizing the political economy of language production and the asymmetries between the builders of commercial AI systems and the users whose communicative lives are increasingly mediated by them.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Bajohr's dual expertise produces an extension of Shklar's framework that Shklar herself did not reach. His observation that commercial AI systems are vocabulary-imposing systems — determining what can be said fluently and what cannot, what arguments are