Stina Attebery, Josh Pearson, and David Higgins, "New Metaphors for AI" (Mini-Symposium)

 

The release of ChatGPT-3 in November 2022 marked a watershed moment in public and industry excitement around probabilistic language-generation tools, accelerating a powerful wave of hype and speculation. Yet as algorithmic systems increasingly shape the social, economic, and affective dimensions of everyday life, our dominant metaphors for describing them remain fantastically out of step with their actual operations and infrastructures. Technologies described today as “artificial intelligence”—which might often be better described as large-scale statistical pattern recognizers—are routinely framed through science fictional references. However, science fiction metaphors that overstate the intelligence, sentience, or autonomy of these systems (e.g., “learning,” “thinking,” or “hallucinating”) perpetuate misunderstandings of how such technologies function and whom they serve.

 

This mini-symposium will investigates old and new metaphors for algorithmic technologies. The three invited speakers aim to move away from using "artificial intelligence" as a metaphor for these technologies and instead find new metaphors that better address their affordances and limitations. What does it mean that our cultural imagination still leans so heavily on 20th-century speculative fiction to make sense of contemporary algorithmic systems? How might we develop new metaphors—rooted in the material, infrastructural, and affective realities of these technologies—that better capture their functions, failures, and social impacts?

 

 

12:00pm - Lunch provided

 

12:15pm - Stina Attebery, "Technological Goop: Metaphors for Generative AI in SOMA”

 

 

 

1:45pm - Discussion