THE NEW SHIBBOLETH

'Say now Shibboleth'; and he said 'Sibboleth'; for he could not frame to pronounce it right
Book of Judges, 12:6

In the biblical story of the Shibboleth (literally, ear of grain in Hebrew, though the word can also mean "rushing stream",) a single mispronounced word separated insider from outsider. Since then, it has named any indicator that identifies someone as one of us or one of them, a human being or less of one. The Shibboleth has always defined what it means to be considered human.

Today, a new version of this test is playing out between humans and AI, where AI's language discloses its identity through various indicators. Yet, research consistently shows that most users across fields fail to make the distinction between human and generated texts. 

The New Shibboleth Project investigates what happens in a world where users can no longer reliably tell whether a text was produced by a human or a machine. We are no longer primarily asking whether AI can pass a Turing test, as that question has largely been answered. We are asking what kinds of cultural tensions the constant search for the new Shibboleth creates and what it reveals about how we perceive what is distinctly human. 

The project has three purposes:

1. Mapping the critical thought and cultural representation of the Shibboleth across history.

2. Providing a theoretical framework for understanding the Shibboleth in the case of nonhuman entities.

3. Work in progress: a timeline of the shifting indicators that users recognize as AI’s Shibboleths since large language models went public. Analyzing what they reveal about perceptions of what makes language human. 

This is a rare moment in the history of language. We intend to understand it.