On Naomi Klein's 'AI Machines Aren't Hallucinating. But Their Makers Are'

In 'AI Machines Aren't Hallucinating. But Their Makers Are', Naomi Klein provides a powerful critique of the architects and ‘boosters’ of generative AI.

It’s hard to disagree with her clinical treatment of the ‘utopian hallucinations’ of Silicon Valley CEOs: that large language model AI will solve the climate crisis, deliver wise governance, and liberate us from drudgery.

Yet like many recent accounts of the dystopian (even fascist!) future of AI, Klein’s analysis still takes an unmarked/black-boxed, modernist-left liberal humanism as the position from which everything else is to be measured and understood. And we can include in this her conceptions of privacy rights, creativity and copyright.

In its destabilising of the belief that art and culture must stem solely from the creativity of human individuals, and opening us up to an expanded notion of intelligence that is not delimited by anthropocentrism, might AI represent an opportunity for ‘we leftists’ even more radical than those Klein points to but quickly discounts? And might this be the case for all she discounts AI’s most exciting promises for good reason: because in order for large language model AI ‘to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home’, it ‘would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life’.

Take the environmental crisis. Our current romantic and extractive attitude toward the environment as both:

1)   passive background to be protected;

2)  freely accessible Lockean resource available to be used to generate wealth and profit

is underpinned by a modernist epistemology based on the separation of human from nonhuman, culture from nature, living from non-living? Yet isn’t it this very epistemology and its ‘human values’ that AI might, just might, help us move beyond?

Experimenting with Copyright Licences

My post on 'Experimenting with Copyright Licences' able to support a collaborative, radically relational approach is now up on the COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) project website.

https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/combinatorial-books-documentation-copyright-licences-post6/release/1

It's part of the documentation for Ecological Rewriting, which is the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers/Open Humanities Press pilot.

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/

It discusses both Creative Commons licenses and Collective Conditions for Re-Use (CC4r) by way of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's 2017 book Assembly.

Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation, edited by James Gabrillo and Nathaniel Zetter

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation, edited by James Gabrillo and Nathaniel Zetter.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Articulating Media is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/articulating-media/

Book description:

To ‘articulate’ media means to understand them by locating their connections in space and time. Articulating Media offers new approaches to the writing of technology and the technologies of writing by twinning an investigation of language with an attention to location. Where does media theory take place? How should media theory understand its own occupation of the spaces of media? What materialities might survive media’s many articulations and associations?

Diverse in topic and method, the collection’s nine chapters analyse those questions of value, representation, and categorisation that are held within the languages of media. Contributors consider media technologies – following previous volumes in the Technographies series – not as mute objects addressed through language, but as processes and devices situated in the very grammars and vocabularies of their address. Scholars of literature, film, musicology, art, design theory, and media history evaluate new linguistic possibilities for thinking across disciplines and for considering the significance of location to media-critical writing. Collectively, the book traces the ways in which media vernaculars have shaped the vernaculars of media theory, and proposes a few ways in which we might reshape them.

Editor Bios

James Gabrillo is an assistant professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. He was previously a lecturer at The New School and a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.

Nathaniel Zetter is a College Teaching Associate in English at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.

Series

Articulating Media is published as part of the Technographies series, edited by Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/technographies/

Data Farms, edited by Tsvetelina Hristova, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Data Farms, edited by Tsvetelina Hristova, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Data Farms is available open access (it can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/data-farms/

Book description:

What is at stake in naming data centres as data farms? These installations are essentially hangars packed with computers. They congregate servers, switches and wires that facilitate the storage, processing and transmission of data in high volumes and at fast speeds. Data centres present a scale of operations, potentially planetary in scope, that intensifies and multiplies the productive and extractive capacities of digital technologies. The economic advantages that accrue to parties with servers in these installations derive not only from opportunities for peering and networking but also from inputs to client machines that may be situated at vast distance. Yet data centres have precise locations, often clustering where there is access to energy, skills, land concessions, tax exemptions or undersea cables. There are no data centres without land and water. Like the ‘dark satanic mills’ associated with the factories of the industrial revolution, data centres burn fossil fuels. Yet, despite these continuities with agrarian and industrial activity, the data economy generates stark figurations of territory, power and circulation.

Contents

LAND AND WATER, Brett Neilson & Ned Rossiter

HABITS, DATA, LABOUR: FROM WAREHOUSES TO DATA CENTRES, Liam Magee & Ned Rossiter

TOWARDS A FEMINIST SERVER STACK, Nancy Mauro-Flude

CLOUD COSMOGRAM, Maya Indira Ganesh & Johannes Bruder

THE INTERNET BEYOND BORDERLESS VERSUS FRAGMENTED, Luke Munn

ISLAND IN THE NET, Stefan Yong

HOW DATA CENTRES PRODUCE TOPOLOGIES OF TERRITORY AND LABOUR, Brett Neilson & Tanya Notley

DATA FARMS SONIFCATION: AN EXPERIMENT IN DATA MODELLING AND SPATIAL AUDIO, Sarah Cashman, Michela Ledwidge & Brett Neilson

DATA CENTRES: IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE, Rolien Hoyng

CAPITAL OPERATIONS: DATA AND WASTE, Brett Neilson

THE DISPOSITIF OF DISTRIBUTION AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF DATA, Florian Sprenge

Editor Bios

Tsvetelina Hristova is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University.

Brett Neilson is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He is author, with Sandro Mezzadra, of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor and The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism.

Ned Rossiter is Director of Research at the Institute for Culture and Society, and Professor of Communication, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. His current book projects include Media of Decision and (with Soenke Zehle) The Experience of Digital Objects: Automation, Aesthetics, Algorithms.

Series

Data Farms is published as part of the Low Latencies series, edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/low-latencies/

Geological Filmmaking and Volumetric Regimes: two new open access books from Open Humanities Press

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of two new open access books:

Geological Filmmaking by Sasha Litvintseva: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/geological-filmmaking/

Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence, edited by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/volumetric-regimes/

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Geological Filmmaking by Sasha Litvintseva: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/geological-filmmaking/

Every film image is geological. As a technical medium derived from the metals and minerals extracted from the earth, every moving image is materially embedded in the world it records. It is also temporally linked to the almost inconceivably vast deep time of the planet’s formation. What would it mean to make films in response to this situation? Geological Filmmaking argues that the challenge lies in situating oneself in the space between the concrete object of a film and the broader planetary conditions of its existence. The nuances of this position are at once formal, ethical and political. Sasha Litvintseva discusses her process of developing such a film practice as a way of tackling the perceptual and aesthetic difficulties presented by ongoing ecological crises. These concerns are explored through the prism of the author’s own films about asbestos and sinkholes in their respective economic and colonial contexts.

Geological Filmmaking develops a new genre of writing rooted in a reciprocity between the practice of making films and the theoretical study of the relations they participate in. Litvintseva expands current conversations in the environmental humanities through building on the rich legacy of experimental film as a tool for producing alternative modes of experiencing the world. The book is intended for readers from a broad range of backgrounds, looking for new ways of dealing with questions about the life and death of our planet.

Geological Filmmaking  is published in our MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW serues, edited by Joanna Zylinska: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/media-art-write-now/

Author Bio

Sasha Litvintseva is an artist, filmmaker, writer and senior lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. Her work is situated at the intersection of media, ecology and the history of science. Her films have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Berlinale and Rotterdam film festivals, Baltic Triennial and Venice Architecture Biennale. She is the author, with Beny Wagner, of All Thoughts Fly: Monster, Taxonomy, Film (Sonic Acts Press, 2021). For more information on her work consult her webpage http://sashalitvintseva.com

 

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Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence, edited by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/volumetric-regimes/

3D computation has historically co-evolved with Modern technosciences, and aligned with the regimes of optimisation, normalisation and hegemonic world order. The legacies and projections of industrial development leave traces of that imaginary and tell the stories of a lively tension between “the probable” and “the possible”. Defined as the techniques for measuring volumes, volumetrics all too easily (re)produce and accentuate the probable, and this process is intensified within the technocratic realm of contemporary hyper-computation. The ubiquity of efficient operations is deeply damaging in the way it gradually depletes the world of all possibility for engagement, interporousness and lively potential. Volumetric Regimes: material cultures of quantified presence proposes an urgent intersectional inquiry into volumetrics to foreground procedural, theoretical and infrastructural practices that provide with a widening of the possible.

Volumetric Regimes emerges from Possible Bodies, a collaborative research activated by Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting on the very concrete and at the same time complex and fictional entities that “bodies” are, asking what matter-cultural conditions of possibility render them present. This becomes especially urgent in relation to technologies, infrastructures and techniques of 3D tracking, modelling and scanning. How does cyborg-ness participate in the presentation and representation of so-called bodies? Intersecting issues of race, gender, class, species, age and ability resurface through these performative as well as representational practices.

Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence is published in our DATA Browser series, which is edited by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/data-browser/

Editor Bios

Jara Rocha is an interdependent researcher-artist. They are currently involved in several disobedient action research projects, such as Volumetric Regimes (with Femke Snelting), The Underground Division (with Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting), The Relearning Series (with Martino Morandi), and Vibes & Leaks (with Kym Ward and Xavier Gorgol). They are part of the curatorial teams of DONE at Foto Colectania, of ISEA at Arts Santa Mònica and of La Capella, all in Barcelona; Jara also teaches screen studies at the Escola Superior de Cinema i Audiovisuals de Catalunya, as well as at the Körper, Theorie und Poetik des Performativen Department at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart. With Karl Moubarak and Cristina Cochior, they conform the Cell for Digital Discomfort at the 21/22 Fellowship for Situated Research of BAK, Utrecht. Jara works through the situated, mundane, and complex forms of distribution of the technological with an antifascist and trans*feminist sensibility, and their show “Naturoculturas son disturbios” emits erratically from dublab.es radio.

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and free software in various constellations. With Seda Gürses, Miriyam Aouragh, and Helen Pritchard, she runs the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest. With the Underground Division (Helen Pritchard and Jara Rocha) she studies the computational imaginations of rock formations, and with Jara Rocha, Femke activates Possible Bodies. She is team member of Programmable Infrastructures (TUDelft), i-DAT (University of Plymouth) and supports artistic research at PhdArts (Leiden), MERIAN (Maastricht) and a.pass (Brussels). Femke teaches at XPUB (MA Experimental Publishing, Rotterdam).