This research suggests that AI remains dependent on human evaluation as a filter. While our digital experiences are algorithmic, aside from AI slop, the content of the internet is human filtered in the sense that we made it. It is also filtered post-hoc in many human ways. There are moderators on Reddit, Wikipedia, and so…
Keep readingIn turn, if AI companies are charging by the token then they have a different market incentive. Verbose responses chew through tokens. The overuse of automation in workflow as when someone prompts a bot to turn a folder of files into a slide deck summary of those files. Reasoning inflation, when users select an over-powered…
Keep readingAt present, liberty and modernity are interwoven. The limited liberty provided 250 years ago required modernization to become the limited liberty of the present. How does freedom function when every individual action contributes to our collective carbon footprint? None of us are free from the externalities of others’ actions. And liberty is relational. While we…
Keep readingAmerique was first published, in French, in 1986. It is a book worth revisiting for entertainment’s sake if nothing else. As he observed then, The fifties were the real high spot for the US (“when things were really going on”), and you can still feel the nostalgia for those years, for the ecstasy of power,…
Keep readingUnderstandably there is a lot of talk around AI tutors as a way of designing a new interaction layer on AI that shapes its processes of predictive continuation toward pedagogy rather than helpfulness. Or something like that, in a nutshell. If we envision AI tutors as attached to a discipline or a particular course, then…
Keep readingI’ve written a few times recently on the concept of friction(less) pedagogy and learning in relation to AI. At the end of Rhetorics of the Digital Nonhumanities, I devote a chapter to pedagogical design, particularly in relation to Rittel and Webber’s wicked design problems. For a number of years, EDUCAUSE’s Horizon Report employed this concept.…
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My academic career has roughly corresponded with the rise of the internet, and the developments of networked digital media have been the focus of my research for the last 30 years. I have investigated the role intelligent machines play in the ways we communicate, the communities we form, and our engagement with larger world.
My current research (book) project is tentatively titled Empire, AI and Society: Artificial Warfare in the Digital Interregnum. My most recent open access publication is “Living on Digital Flatlands: Assemblies of Computer Vision.” Here’s the abstract.
This article explores computer vision not only in terms of its use with “intelligent” machines, such as autonomous vehicles, but also more broadly in terms of quotidian, digitally-mediated human vision, such as that experienced through smartphones. Drawing on assemblage theory and radical media archeology, I describe the technological processes that link together materially different spatiotemporal assemblages to produce a posthuman condition of computer vision typified by what Wolfgang Ernst terms the “epistemogenic momentum” of “techno-mathematical configurations.” Manuel DeLanda’s flat ontologies prove useful here for describing how assemblages operating in different space-times interact. I then turn to Deleuze and Guatarri’s techno-semiological stratum, specifically their discussion of the stratum’s spatiotemporal superlinearity, to articulate an emerging digital-calculative layer. I argue that understanding computer vision assemblages requires more than setting technical descriptions alongside cultural-ideological critique; it also requires an integrated analysis of the roles digital nonhumans perform in the production of a new visual regime with new capacities and desires. The shared human-nonhuman capacity of computer vision moves sight from the biological and linguistic assemblages of humans into digital assemblages where vision becomes calculable and subject to algorithmic modifications. The results are not only digitally-composed, screened images, but also new means of production, organization, and identity.
Alex Reid, Professor of Digital Rhetoric, Media, and Artificial Intelligence 