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
Refusing AI: three Venn diagrams
I’ve been asked to discuss CCCC’s recent resolution on the right to refuse AI. I have already written about it here. From my perspective, this particular resolution is an academic freedom issue within a single discipline and largely focused on one kind of course: first-year composition. As this course is often taught by adjuncts, graduate…
Keep readingAI and what may be refused
When we are refusing AI, what are we refusing? A CS field? A commercial product? An ideology? A story? And what does AI refuse of us? What does the higher ed story of AI refuse of us and our students?
Keep readingartificial intelligence, going nowhere, and the remedy for thought
As we know, utopia is nowhere, literally. Much of the literary movement of “anti-anti-utopianism” can be understood as a recognition that utopia’s seek to go nowhere and dystopias are what result from the attempt. It might be useful to reframe this as anti-anti-nowhere-ism, but probably not. This confusing triple negative might be resolved in the…
Keep reading“mirror world” stories of fascism and AI
Ezra Klein has an interview with Naomi Klein today regarding her new book, Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. It’s a wide-ranging conversation. Klein’s mirror-world has part to do with her being confused online with Naomi Wolf (90’s feminist turned conspiracy theorist podcaster). But that’s just one interesting story of mirroring that’s part of…
Keep readingAI at the accident of epistemic collapse
Among Paul Virilio’s well-known concepts is that each new technology creates its own accident. I’ve discussed this earlier suggesting that generative AI creates the accident of AI-generated versions of all former accidents. We can think of this as alternative or as a different way of describing the same accident. An epistemic collapse occurs when there…
Keep readingthe ethical consequences of lethal AI
AI output can claim no knowledge or ethical responsibility but both knowledge and consequence are produced as the output turns a building into rubble. There are humans in (and on) various loops. We could hold them accountable as the ones who know and who bear responsibility. They might take legal ownership but they do not…
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Alex Reid, Professor of Digital Rhetoric, Media, and Artificial Intelligence 