Author: Alex Reid
Professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo
I attended an event on campus about AI (specifically generative AI) and how it was being approached in different disciplines and units. We are where everyone basically is, which is “Keep swimming. I think I see an island ahead.” One shared worry about generative AI is that its results are unreliable. Setting aside “cheating,” students […]
I’m teaching our introductory graduate course on “Media Theory” in the fall. The stereotype of these courses is that they are like a week-long tour of Western Europe (it’s Tuesday it must be feminism or Rome or whatever). While we anoint certain people as “theorists” in the humanities, that’s not really a job. It’s certainly […]
A familiar cautionary tale about AI is the paper clip maximizer, where an AI destroys the world in pursuit of its seemingly banal task of making paper clips efficiently. The story imagines an AI with general, even superhuman, intelligence and agency. The debates continue about whether or not AGI will ever be achieved. But what […]
On Friday night I attended an intermedia performance of faculty and students. It was an impressive array of concepts, techniques, and expertise varying from dancers performing music with wearable computing devices to the sonification of data about sunsets and much more. There was (what I’d call) a posthuman DJ experience going on, where the interfaces […]
The University at Buffalo has been in the news (and social media) over an upcoming event involving a controversial speaker invited by a conservative student group on campus. I’m not here to discuss the particulars of this case or how to respond to it. I’m sure Google can help you learn more. My interest is […]
Writing a post analyzing the moral panic surrounding the latest digital media technology is nearly as boring as participating in the moral panic itself. Let’s not worry too much about ChatGPT. In a decade it will probably seem as quaint as Clippy. So I’ve got a tangent here and this Harry Potter-esque post title. I’ll […]
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the volumetric capture of agency
The FIFA World Cup has had a recent habit of introducing new media technologies into the sporting world. That’s not surprising given its status as a global spectacle. Given the many controversial aspects of this year’s event in Qatar, the introduction of the “semi-automated video assistant referee” is relatively mild. However, it’s an excellent example […]
There are a number of ways to understand the term “computational rhetoric.” In no particular order, the first might be something like critical code studies in that one studies the rhetoric practices of coding. A second would be akin to machine reading in the digital humanities, doing rhetorical analysis of a large textual corpus, or […]
I imagine it comes as no surprise to academics across these fields that instrumentalism is typically a dirty word. It is epithet applied liberally including the rejection of coursework that is overly practical or focused on “how-to” (e.g. teaching writing), of degree programs deemed to be too focused on preparing students for specific careers, and […]
Alex Reid 