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
Is the AI Bubble Bursting? Gambling on the AI Forward University
The bubble doesn’t have to be that bad to bring financial and reputational damage to the AI Forward university. All that really has to happen is that decreased confidence in investment in Frontier AI destabilizes the value proposition of investing in the AI Forward university. The financial damage will be obvious in all the money…
Keep readingContext Laundering and the Human Bottleneck in AI Research
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 readingThe tokenpocalyptic university: or, upon learning that water is wet
In 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 readingoperational hyperreality: 40 years of Baudrillard’s America
Amerique 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 readingDo AI tutors dream of electric students?
Understandably 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 readingthe friction embedded in AI educational designs
I’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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Alex Reid, Professor of Digital Rhetoric, Media, and Artificial Intelligence 