I guess the reason I got here was in thinking through what makes my work with AI “unique” or else part of a common cultural idiom of people who are using these tools. What characteristics describe us? What are the common themes?

The ones I’ve found so far, are these:

1) centaur/cyborg operator/authorship;

2) networked narratives (entities + relationships + characteristics + changes over time);

3) hyperreality, meta-commentary, disorientation, deconstruction;

4) oscillating polarities of meta-modernism, closeness/distance, sincerity/irony/inauthenticity.

There’s another possible fifth theme I just identified that might make sense to unpack more separately, what I’m calling the “prima materia” after the alchemists, but in this context could take several meanings from the training data which was ingested into the AIs. Whether or not that data included copyrighted materials is only one small part of a much bigger struggle we will need to grapple with in terms of what do we actually want these models to model, of all the things that human nature can be, all the good and bad? What are the cultural, social, political, historical, technological constructs which informed all of this technology in the first place, and what is it merely perpetuating?

Anyway, I’m sure there are more out there, but those are the broad themes that I’ve struck upon myself and seen supported in the writing of others that is emerging on these topics.

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