Reposted by Matt Collins
Matt Collins
@mattkicks.bsky.social
213 followers 267 following 655 posts
Product Design & UI/UX. Retired captain of Commonwealth Skateboarding. Writer & illustrator of Matt's Endless Comic endlesscomic.bsky.social I hate driving. Portland, Oregon @matt_kicks most other places. mattkicks.com
![In this paper, I turn this frame on its head (cf. Andersen et al., 2023; Bannon, 2011;
Bishop, 2021; Nick Dyer-Witheford, 2019; Rogers, 2022; Ryan, 2024; Schmager et al., 2025;
Shneiderman, 2022; Steinhoff, 2021; Walton & Nayak, 2021). Using a unique (re)definition of
AI that releases us from a correlationist1 grip, we then examine three triplets as case studies of
techno-social relationships between cognition and artifacts. To presage the coming analyses,
herein AI is any techno-social relationship that outsources to machines or algorithms some
part, however small, of human cognitive labour (cf. van Rooij et al., 2024). I demonstrate
that AI is human-centric, not because it behaves like or is designed to be like humans, but
because it requires a ghost in the machine, often literally an obfuscated human-in-the-loop
to properly function (also see Guest & Martin, 2025) because AI is humans albeit in fetishised
(Braune, 2020; Morris, 2017; Mota & Cosentino Filho, 2024), obfuscated forms (e.g. Erscoi
et al., 2023). That is, AI “is in reality produced by relations among people [even though
it] appears before us in a fantastic form as relations among things” (Pfaffenberger, 1988, p.
250). AI’s “technological veil” hides human cognitive labour (Mota & Cosentino Filho, 2024).
I bring this anthropological, sociotechnical and broadly computational cognitive scientific
angle to understanding AI, that is unlike “the skills and techniques of behavioural research,
previously applied to humans and other animals[, which claim to help us] better understand
the ‘psychology’ of complex black-box ANNs” (Wills, 2025, n.p. cf. Raley and Rhee, 2023). In
fact behavioural probing of such systems using such experimental techniques assumes their
psychological standing to be equal to, or comparable to, biological organisms: it begs the
question (see for relevant analyses: Forbes & Guest, 2025; Guest & Martin, 2023, 2024; Raji
et al., 2022).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreifq2kxakpbsa44my235o2jn72u4dzyrqgvnuoldrzlddstahocdxm)
