iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org · 08/10/2026

Tomorrow and Saturday at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social, free and open to all. Stop by if you're in the area!

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is sure to be another landmark event in the development of Critical AI Studies.

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Dez Miller @dezmiller.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Very excited for this!

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Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org · 24/09/2026

The program for our Critical AI Studies? conference, happening Oct. 9&10 at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social, is now online: huml.ucsb.edu/conference. Hope to see you there!

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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Looking forward to attending & presenting at the upcoming “Critical AI Studies?” conference, organized by @zentralwerkstatt.org and @owenleonard.bsky.social at UCSB: huml.ucsb.edu/conference

huml.ucsb.edu

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meson press @mesonpress.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

🚀 Digital version is out! 🚀 BUT we do think this one 📕 is so beautiful thanks to the 💨 cover pic by Trevor Paglen @paglen.studio -> everyone should get the real thing. 📚 @zentralwerkstatt.org @uminnpress.bsky.social also Leo Impett & Johanna Drucker meson.press/books/vector...

Three different books of Meson Press series "In Search Of Media". On top 'Vector Media', and in the background 'Digital Theory' and 'Neural Networks'.

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Lauren Klein @laurenfklein.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Last day to submit! Deadline is today!

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Alan Liu @alanyliu.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I posted on arXiv.org the preprint of my “AI Virtue: What Is ‘Good’ Knowledge in the Age of Artificial Intelligence?” arxiv.org/abs/2607.01776, which is forthcoming in a double special issue of “MFS Modern Fiction Studies on “Cultural AI” in 2027.

Screenshot of preprint abstract:

"In the age of AI, what will be good knowledge? This article, which is accepted and forthcoming in a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on "Cultural AI" in 2027, applies digital humanities methods to map epistemic virtues (like "true," "accurate," "creative") used in a corpus of 553 journal articles on AI published in 2024. "Creativity" comes in for special attention as an example. Exploring this discourse of value, the article considers how a framework might be developed for evaluating the knowledge-worth of AI -- one less locked into values formed around pre-AI "knowledge work" agents or structures, and more open to the future values of "generativity." The essay is supported by an online digital kit for exploring data models of the corpus of articles on AI it studies."

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Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org · 23/06/2026

Excited to share that we are now inviting proposals for our upcoming Critical AI Studies? conference at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social on Oct. 9&10, 2026. Please see the full CfP here: huml.ucsb.edu/conference. Submissions are due July 31, 2026. For questions DM me or @owenleonard.bsky.social.

Poster for the conference "Critical Artificial Intelligence Studies?" at the University of California, Santa Barbara, October 9&10, 2026. The subtitle says "An interdisciplinary conference on a field in formation."

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

Interesting to note that LLMs must be actively discouraged from overusing lists as a form. From Claude 4 system prompt: “Claude responds in sentences or paragraphs and should not use lists […] should not use bullet points or numbered lists […] should write in prose and paragraphs without any lists”

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Also not exactly true—LLMs produce a probable continuation *given some context* So a novel context makes a novel continuation possible, though post-training on most commercial models likely nudges things back towards a (broadly conceived) mean

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James E. Dobson @jeddobson.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

Bound to be one of the most important critical and theoretical books on the meaning of neural networks (and not just for vision). Congratulations to Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org! Freshly published from meson press and University of Minnesota Press. @uminnpress.bsky.social

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Fabian Offert @zentralwerkstatt.org · 29/04/2026

Vector Media is out today!

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

11am/8pm (Boston time) tomorrow!

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Join us for a follow-up conference to Cultural Politics of the Computational Image, this time online. Friday, January 23, day/night. Register for the zooms at: globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci-workshop/

Poster for "More Cultural Politics of the Computational Image," Friday Jan 23, 2026.

Schedule
SESSION 1. 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EST
Amitabh Vikram (Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University), “Holy Pixels: Temple CCTV, Darshan Livestreams, and Crowd Vision”
Ann Wang (University of Pennsylvania), “Amphibious Tropics: Automation, Extraction, and the Imaging (Making) of Malaysia’s Geospatial Landscape”
Hansun Hsiung (Durham University), “NHK Engineers Meet Media Theory: The Televisual Image in Japan’s ‘Informationalizing Society’”

SESSION 2. 8:00 – 9:30 PM EST
Ding-Liang Chen (National Tsing Hua University), “Prospecting Resource: Early Satellite Vision and War Ecologies in Southeast Asia”
Joia Duskic (UCLA), “The Procession Does Not Proceed, It Gets Prompted from the Sidelines”
Yedong Sh-Chen (Harvard University), “Under the Chinese Skin: A Digital Dermatology of Video Games”

Register at https://globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci-workshop/

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Reposted by Owen Leonard

Teddy Roland @teddyroland.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

New article in AI & Society with @richardjeanso.bsky.social and @hoytlong.bsky.social 🎉 We wanted to know how AI might affect cultural fields like literary publishing. But cultural production is complex! So we piloted a new method we call “social simulation.” rdcu.be/eTkMy

rdcu.be

The social AI author: modeling creativity and distinction in simulated cultural fields

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

maybe blogs or listservs that I don’t know about are doing this work, but that whole ecosystem seems very diffuse

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

I do think there may be a need for some kind of preprint server for humanities-inflected position papers—for instance, the DeepSeek-OCR release last month could have produced a lot of interesting 5-6 page reflections on word and image that wouldn’t really fit the journal format

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

there’s an indexical aspect to stock photos like these that’s really lacking in AI images

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

did the great tragedians ever consider simply instructing their readers to feel sad?

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

something has been wrong with Chronicling’s (or LOC’s?) rate limiter for a while, because I had similar issues earlier this year

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

that is, the cultural and economic forces that have shaped the development of AI are in many ways the same forces that have shaped the development of our notion of “the human” as such—making it a poor locus of resistance

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

I think in general it’s somewhat irresponsible to stake your critique of AI on some stable, essential idea of what it means to “be human” or “act human”—not only are those categories extremely flexible, they inherit heavily from the same tradition of rationalism that got us here in the first place!

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

(this objection is directed at Chollet, of course, not you)

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

What good could ARC-AGI possibly be if systems can do well on it without exhibiting generalizable intelligence??

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

If your response to someone achieving good performance on your benchmark is to complain that they didn’t do it the way you wanted to, you have a bad benchmark

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

If I’m reading this right, Sam is basically saying outright that the GPT-5 personality changes are in response to the “ChatGPT psychosis” panic?? If so, I’m surprised that OpenAI is so rattled.

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Of course LW’s conception of “forms of life” is anthropomorphic, and it’s hardly fair to expect him to have foreseen the present state of NLP, but the fact that LLMs exhibit linguistic competence *would* seem to challenge the idea that shared word-conventions must reflect agreement in forms of life.

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

It’s just not obvious to me that the operations of an LLM in silica do not constitute a form of life, if a very alien one. I may be misreading PI but it seems to me that any experience which imparts linguistic competence qualifies as a form of life, and that LLM training is such an experience.

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

PI also warns against “the temptation to invent a myth of meaning”—which so many (shallow) critiques of LLMs do by equating meaning to the favored signifiers of humanism (art, beauty, the soul, etc.)

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Yes, absolutely. The work then is to specify what those ways of meaning-making are and why they are important.

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

in other words, I guess, is touching silicon so different from touching grass?

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Wittgenstein says that “we are talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language, not some non-spatial, non-temporal phantasm”—but then again, Matt’s work so effectively reminds us that computation is not as non-spatial and non-temporal as it is sometimes made to seem.

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

But I do think it’s worth asking where the invocation of the symbol grounding problems leads rhetorically wrt general-purpose value judgments about LLMs, and I think it’s often to the same kind of shallow, knee-jerk humanism that’s been a feature of AI discourse since time immemorial. end/

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

To be clear, I don’t think that you’re doing this here and I do think that the symbol grounding problem is a much more salient and well-founded characterization of LLMs than glorified autocomplete, just linear algebra, stochastic parrots, and so on. 3/

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

And I think the answer often involves an implicit or explicit appeal to some value-laden humanistic category (art, love, beauty, empathy, etc.) that is assumed to be accessible only to beings that use language in an embodied, grounded way. 2/

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

I think the issue I have with the symbol grounding problem is not its basic contention, but its framing as a “problem” rather than a descriptive account of how computers use language. If we accept that “LLMs can’t touch grass,” as I’m inclined to, the next question is so what? 1/

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 10/08/2025

it would be like saying that the tiger is made out of protons

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 10/08/2025

also just not true at the most basic technical level, nonlinear activations between matrix multiplications are super important for networks to learn anything useful

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 10/08/2025

“it’s just matrix multiplication” is probably the worst one, and always delivered so smugly

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

to be fair, it’s hard to make a tasteful advertisement for brain pills

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

transformers are the key exception that just embraced the bitter lesson from the start and flaunted their lack of any real inspiration in linguistics or neuroscience

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

it gets obscured because conceptual parsimony or theoretical intuition often leads to models that effectively leverage computation, even if the intuition turns out to be mostly wrong—see BatchNorm, ReLU, even the neural network itself to some extent

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

the bitter lesson isn’t just “scale always wins,” it’s “leveraging computation is always more effective in the limit than leveraging domain knowledge,” which has proven basically incontrovertible

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Owen Leonard @owenleonard.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

history of ML suggests that while the model may hold up under scrutiny, its conceptual link to human cognition/neurophys likely will not—reaffirming the bitter lesson after all

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