Cybernetic Forests

"Many doomsday anxieties around AI likely reflect the broader epistemological shift away from language as a source of truth. The anxieties we place on them now reflect a deep unease and unfamiliarity with how we navigate a world where words persuade without regard to reality." - @eryk.bsky.social

From Interactive to Interpassive Where AI Art Meets Cognitive Offloading There is the joke about AI: we wanted robots to do our dishes so we could have time to make art, but we got robots that make art while we do the dishes. We can...

This week I reach back to the 1990s and the concept of “interpassivity,” a critique of the widespread idea that “interaction” was inherently liberating for an audience. But to think in nuanced and critical ways about creativity with generative AI, the “gesture of disappearance” has new salience.

What Was ChatGPT? A Chatbot Optimized for Social Distance Three years after the launch of ChatGPT, we can finally speak in hindsight about what it was and how it came to be. Its meteoric rise shocked the world, gather...

ChatGPT is 3 years old this week — what was the world like in late 2022, and how did that shape what ChatGPT has become? I wrote about ChatGPT as a pandemic technology, centered on expectations of social isolation in ways that continue to define it. mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-was-cha...

Portrait of Eryk

In two weeks from now, on May 13 at 6:30pm, the amazing Eryk Salvaggio @cyberneticforests.bsky.social will come to Zurich to speak about «Embodied Generativity: Critical AI, Art & the Body» at ZHdK, presented by @zkk-zurich.bsky.social
www.zentrumkuensteundkulturtheorie.ch//veranstaltu...

Most Researchers Do Not Believe AGI Is Imminent. Why Do Policymakers Act Otherwise? | TechPolicy.Press Tech Policy Press fellow Eryk Salvaggio says it is dangerous to the public interest for policymakers to center the pursuit of AGI in AI policy.

Most researchers don’t believe AGI is coming any time soon. But policy makers are steering policy toward AGI anyway. In this article for Tech Policy Press, a look at the distortions the AGI Frame introduces to policymaking. #ai #criticalai #aipolicy In @techpolicypress.bsky.social

The AI State is a Surveillance State | TechPolicy.Press Tech Policy Press is a nonprofit media and community venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. We publish opinion and analysis.

A Nixon-era report warned of data-driven surveillance before AI even existed. Today, the government is linking databases & using “fraud detection” as a cover for targeting citizens, writes Eryk Salvaggio. What happens when free speech is redefined as a “threat”?

"generative AI, is built on a long-standing regime of extracting wealth from information, and a reliance on cheap labor to maximize the information it has collected. Treating generative AI as a revolutionary new tool,...

Anatomy of an AI Coup | TechPolicy.Press DOGE is gutting federal agencies to install AI across the government. Democracy is on the line, writes Tech Policy Press fellow Eryk Salvaggio.

My latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, “Anatomy of an AI Coup.” With the takeover of the US government by tech elites underway, we must examine its goals and next steps — and how we will know if it has succeeded. www.techpolicy.press/anatomy-of-a...

AIxDESIGN We’re a Global Community and Lab Nourishing Alternative, Feminist + Participatory Approaches to AI for the Rest of Us 🐛

Helloooooo BlueSky! 🌤️ We have just landed and will share more here soon 🥠 meanwhile find us and updates at -> aixdesign.co + linkin.bio/aixdesign-co/

A Fork in the Road AI is an excuse that allows those with power to operate at a distance from those whom their power touches.

Another fantastic read and lots of ‚food for thought’ by Eryk Salvaggio 👌🏻 @cyberneticforests.bsky.social
‚ChatGPT is not a decision-making technology, it is a decision-removing technology. It creates text to fill the space where a decision is needed’ mail.cyberneticforests.com/a-fork-in-th...

How to Become an Intellectual in Silicon Valley | Aaron Timms You now have ideas, an all-purpose acknowledgments section, and a font. How should you present everything? “Write like you talk,” Paul Graham once said, but he forgot to add: “And talk like an asshole...

From 2021 — when it was still benign — a revealing bit of satire aimed at the “intellectual movement” that is currently shaping the policies of the United States.

The Three Social Dimensions of Chatbot Technology - Philosophy & Technology The development and deployment of chatbot technology, while spanning decades and employing different techniques, require innovative frameworks to understand and interrogate their functionality and imp...

“This study presents a structured examination of chatbots across three societal dimensions, highlighting their roles as objects of scientific research, commercial instruments, and agents of intimate interaction.” link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Are Other AIs Possible? I believe AI is a political tool. I believe this because I believe that AI, and much other technology, is something of an ideological frame: a set of social fictions that is deployed to justify certai...

We are seeing a generation of AI systems built without their designers critically grappling with their role in the broader world. Could we do it some other way?

A Culture Inside On David Lynch, AI, and the Myth of Automated Interiority My closest real-life encounter with David Lynch was getting into a Lyft that had just dropped him off at the premiere of Twin Peaks: The Retu...

I wrote about David Lynch’s practice, in contrast to the model of creativity at the heart of the Gen AI image industry. I ask if the culture we cultivate inside of us could ever connect to Gen AI’s world of endlessly rearranged surfaces. mail.cyberneticforests.com/a-culture-of...

I was added to a “MAGA Trash” blocklist. I am not at all MAGA. While I don’t care about blocklists, this is a reminder to everyone to be wary of using blocklists from accounts they don’t trust.

This account exists but will likely be an automated announcement feed for future newsletters — for the most part I’m just @eryk.bsky.social!

New 404 Media: University of Michigan is selling hours and hours of audio recordings of office hours, study groups, and more to outside third-parties to train AI. Selling for tens of thousands of dollars, not clear if participants gave informed consent. I got sample www.404media.co/university-o...

In light of increasing artificial intelligence and proliferating conspiracy, technofetishism and moral panics, faith in ubiquitous data capture and mistrust of public institutions, the ascendance of STEM and the ‘deplatforming’ of the arts and humanities, this article considers doubt as an epistemological condition, a political tool, an ethical force, a rhetorical register, and an aesthetic category. Adapted from the author’s May 2023 inaugural King’s Public Lecture in Digital Humanities at King’s College London, and structured in the form of a syllabus for a speculative class, it aims to identify where humanistic conceptions of doubt do, or could or should, reside within our digital systems: at the interface, within the code, or engineered into hardware and infrastructure.

A screenshot featuring a lovely Daniell Manley's painting that depicts three modes of representation: hand-written characters, a colorful grid, and leaf-like scribbles, which evoke disparate ways of communicating certainty and accuracy

Many moons ago I shared a talk about "modeling doubt," coding and engineering uncertainty into our digital systems, and weaving it into our pedagogy. That talk was published today, open access, in the Journal of Visual Culture. The whole new issue is great! journals.sagepub.com/toc/VCU/curr...

Hi folks! I'm designing an undergrad course on the history & ethics of archives & collecting across the liberal arts. We're talking archival silences, data ethics, repatriation, collecting and empire. I'm super excited about it, but struggling to find suitable reading. What would you assign? TIA!

Before-and-after images of the Moon as altered by Samsung's camera phone

Samsung now has a defense of its phone's AI-altering photos of the Moon: "There is no such thing as a real picture."
Paging @cyberneticforests.bsky.social (not to mention Cindy Sherman)
www.theverge.com/2024/2/2/240...

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim

I actually read the original story for the first time right before reading this new one. Both are great. clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

Discerning Audiences Through Like Buttons · Issue 6.1, Winter 2024

Digging this fun historical perspective on the like button from Carina Albrecht in the Harvard Data Science Review. Thanks to @cheeflo.bsky.social for turning me onto this one.

Rebecca Solnit · In the Shadow of Silicon Valley: Losing San Francisco I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city...

“Seeing cars​ with no human inside move through San Francisco’s streets is eerie enough…but when I’m on my bicycle I often find myself riding alongside them, and from that vantage point you catch the ghostly spectacle of a steering wheel turning without a hand.”
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Zine — Cybernetic Forests.

In November we announced a zine, "Models for Making Distance," which would collect instructions and manifestos for creative acts of algorithmic resistance. The deadline is April 15, and then we print. We would love to have your contributions! More details: www.cyberneticforests.com/zine

IMO crucial & productive distinction in @eryk.bsky.social 's newsletter today re: AI tools. I had lots of fun trying out Midjourney over the last year, partially because I professionally write on visual cultures & want to understand how things work, but also because I'm a total sucker for TOOLS 1/7

In “The making of critical data center studies,” @melhogan.bsky.social, Dustin Edwards, and I draw together threads across the humanities to critically examine the past, present, and possible futures of studying these weird structures we call data centers. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Who is “the public” when it comes to “public engagement in AI”?

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Ars Technica headline: Following lawsuit, rep admits “AI” George Carlin was human-written Creators still face "name and likeness" complaints; lawyer says suit will continue. KYLE ORLAND - UPDATED 1/27/2024, 8:44 PM

need to start keeping a list of all the times some big supposed display of bleeding edge technology turns out to just be A Guy

Text excerpt from a book about artificial intelligence, discussing the evolution of horse imagery from cave paintings to photography and film, referencing Peter Norvig and Pablo Picasso's perspectives on technological progress in image capture.

Flicking through an older book, I come across this analogy:
More data not only brings quantity but fundamentally alters quality.

Presented at the SAIL Workshop - Fundamental Limits of Large Language ModelsProf. Iris van Rooij (Radboud University, Netherlands & Aarhus University, Denma... Iris van Rooij - Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science

In case you prefer watching a video over reading our "Reclaiming AI" paper (preprint available at osf.io/preprints/ps...), here you go 🙂 Enjoy! 🎬🍿

www.youtube.com/watch?v=akuJ...