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Neural Network Necromancy

An experimental media archaeology

of language models

Tim Cowlishaw, PhD Candidate, BAU Centre Universitari d’Arts i Disseny, Barcelona, España.

tim@timcowlishaw.co.uk / @mistertim@assemblag.es

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“What must be discarded for this or that system to carry on?”

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“Historical re-enactments.”

(Fickers, 2013)

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“Do not seek the old in the new, but ﬁnd something new in the old.”

(Zielinski, 2008)

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“the past as a generative and imaginative space”

(Forlano & Halpern, 2023)

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Questions to ask

How am I interacting with this “AI”? How is it different to how I interact with an LLM like Chat-GPT? How does its interface and affordances condition how we interact with it? What types of “conversation” are possible?

In what ways might it be considered “intelligent”? How does this compare to or differ to an LLM like Chat-GPT?

What might it look like taken to an extreme? If future AI was more like this than like Chat-GPT?

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ELIZA: https://tinyurl.com/NNN-Eliza

Markov Chains: https://tinyurl.com/NNN-Markov

GPT-2: https://tinyurl.com/NNN-GPT2

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Thankyou!

tim@timcowlishaw.co.uk / @mistertim@assemblag.es

Bibliography

Fickers, A. (2013) ‘Experimental Media Archaeology: A Plea for New Directions’, Annie van den Oever (ed.). Technē/Technology Researching Cinema and Media Technologies – Their Development, Use, and Impact (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), pp. 272-278. [Preprint]. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/5578016/Experimental_Media_Archaeology_A_Plea_for_New_Directions (Accessed: 14 November 2023).

Forlano, L.E. and Halpern, M.K. (2023) ‘Speculative Histories, Just Futures: From Counterfactual Artifacts to Counterfactual Actions’, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 30(2), p. 22:1-22:37. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1145/3577212.

Liboiron, M. and Lepawsky, J. (2022) Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.

Zielinski, S. (2008) Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Illustrated edition. Translated by G. Custance. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.