Written By Sebastiano Paolo Lampignano
Innovation & People Management Director
Abstract
This paper revisits selected studies by Umberto Eco to explore their relevance in understanding generative AI, ranging from his definitions of different types of Encyclopedias to the concept of textual cooperation, including all the elements that emerge in between – text, context, enunciation, model reader, and labyrinthine knowledge. These are interpreted, within Generative Artificial Intelligence systems, as regulative ideas capable of functional – albeit partial – forms of application.
However, this framework raises a fundamental question: are we still within the domain of semiotics, or are we facing a new epistemological threshold?
The proposal advanced here is that the current configuration of GenAI (Generative Artificial Intelligence) systems can no longer be analysed exclusively through the tools of generative and/or interpretive semiotics but instead requires an extension of the field of study – emerging in recent years – referred to as Semiomatics.
[…]
From Semiotics to Semiomatics
The intervention of non-human entities and elements in the generation of meaning calls for a constructive reconsideration of semiotics, from which emerges the proposed field of study referred to as Semiomatics. It is acknowledged that many theories – and the terms used to articulate them – were developed in contexts in which the human being was both subject and object of inquiry. As a result, they often prove difficult to adapt to new realities. Terms such as understanding, thinking, reasoning, learning, and perceiving, for instance, may become problematic when applied beyond the human domain. In hybrid contexts – or even in purely artificial ones – can semiotics alone still serve as the framework capable of accompanying these new cognitive developments?
In some studies, it has been proposed to apply semiotics to Artificial Intelligence as if it were a “particular case of falsification” (Leone, 2023). Certainly, this may represent an interesting possibility that deserves further exploration. However, it may be useful – drawing on the profound work of Henri Bergson – to consider the current stage as merely one among many that have preceded it and will follow; otherwise, the risk that “we have loaded movement with immobility” (Bergson, 1938) would be considerable. It is therefore necessary to engage coherently with this ongoing transformation, within which the underlying objective – at times deliberately concealed – is not simply to simulate human intelligence, but to surpass it. This is a thought that undoubtedly provokes unease yet remains highly plausible.
Within this complex context, the term Semiomatics may be understood as an interdisciplinary field of study aimed at analysing:
- the automated production of signs;
- the circulation of meaning in hybrid scenarios (human and non-human), if not even in the absence of necessarily human subjects;
- a new semiotics of knowledge;
- the encyclopedic manipulation carried out by statistical machines;
- the use of signs as operations rather than as interpretations.
It is evident that underlying some of the considerations presented is a fundamental question: what, then, is the difference between Semiomatics and Computational Semiotics? One might offer a concise answer by stating that Semiomatics, beyond the electronic processing of signs, aims to revise and/or identify semiotic theories and methods in which the human being is no longer the dominant subject, but rather one – not necessarily always present – among the actors involved. In this sense, Semiomatics could not merely extend semiotics into the computational domain, but would instead reconfigure its anthropological foundation, shifting the focus from human-centered semiosis to distributed and potentially non-subjective processes of signification.
It emerges at a specific juncture within Umberto Eco’s semiotics: where the sign continues to function – or appears to do so – while the human interpreter disappears. This new domain of inquiry must therefore question not only how signs operate, but also what kind of world they produce when detached from human embodiment. Drawing again on Eco’s work, it could be understood either as an extension of general semiotics or as one among the specific semiotics (Eco, 1984b). Future research will undoubtedly provide Semiomatics with its proper theoretical positioning.
2026 Ⓒ – Written by Sebastiano Paolo Lampignano – all rights reserved
