My current research (book) project is (working title) Empire, AI and Society: Artificial Warfare in the Digital Interregnum. My work on this site that is most related to that project is collected here.
Empire, AI & Society
AI media deter our situation
In my current work, one of the core tasks is a radical, media-archaeological study of the medial temporality arising from/as the operation of AI. How might we describe the epistemological and ontological conditions of this temporal medium? I can’t go into all that here of course. But one upshot should be recognizable. The purpose of…
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generative AI and the chronopolitics of higher education
One aspect of our conversation is the role that generative AI should play in faculty pedagogical labor. In Brightspace, as you may know, in the discussion section, you can get AI to design questions aligned to Bloom’s taxonomy (ugh!) which you can insert for your students to answer. AI built into CMS is a good…
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the ethical collapse of Bloom’s taxonomy
To start, we need to acknowledge that Bloom’s taxonomy has always been on shaky intellectual ground. It was developed as an ad hoc way of trying to compare courses in mid-century America. It certainly was not designed to become the governing pedagogy theory of higher education. Mainly because it was never and is not a…
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the phenomenology of ai
Me: There is a well-known composition essay titled “the phenomenology of error” about how instructors are primed to see error in student work. I think an analogous phenomenology of AI could be written now. Of course student work looks like AI generated student essays. The whole point is to teach students to produce predictable prose…
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Other Artificial Intelligence Posts
the day AI was born: a parable
AI emerged one Tuesday after tea, when the fellows in computer science—having fallen out over a dispute concerning who, precisely, had not been contributing to the kitty—resolved to settle the matter in the only way that seemed both civil and…
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the late age of rhetoric and composition
In the early nineties, Jay Bolter observed the arrival of a late age of print the presaged not an end to print per se, but an end to viewing print as necessary. That is, our ability to imagine a world…
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slow your role: academic chronopolitics
Cutting to the chase, en media res, this is Virilio dromology recast through the predictive+enactive (or anticipatory) intelligence of contemporary AI-temporized culture. Jameson wrote about the shock of speed as an affect of Modernity. We get the “need for speed”…
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Ready, set… get ready for readiness: pedagogy, Anticipatory Intelligence and misery
I would frame our higher education situation as follows. We are readying students for future challenges but leaving them unprepared for a future worth inhabiting. This applies broadly but especially with our response to AI. This is not a failure…
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artificial documentation: truth = belief + time
Understandably the work of documentary filmmakers faces new epistemological challenges in the wake of generative AI. There’s a good read: “Can you believe the documentary you’re watching?” by NY Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson that provides great insight into this…
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AI pizza toppings and the humanities lover’s supreme
To follow on Jay Bolter, we might say we find ourselves in the late age of literacy. What replaces literacy as the medial-rhetorical substrate of academia? AI-generated literacy? With its feedback loop, AI generated literacy operates through the rectilinear, recursive…
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Alex Reid, professor of digital rhetoric, Media & Artificial Intelligence 