AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent MachinesImagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines

摘要

Emergent artificial intelligence (AI) technologies seem to augur a break between poetics today and the poetics of yesteryear. Were we to ask our handheld magic mirrors what kind of poetics now matter most urgently, they (or at least many of the SubStacks they bring us) might well answer: “Today, poetics is whatever one makes of generative AI—or whatever generative AI makes of poetics.” As we strive to understand the forms, cultures, and histories of past literature, we may feel that such AI—or, to be more exact, the hype it receives—casts a chilling shadow over us by instead highlighting how in the near future writing may involve processes that at present we cannot quite comprehend. Still, as the essays in these volumes collectively demonstrate, the past still matters for the future. Whatever twenty-first-century AI technologies may bring, we are motivated to develop such technologies, orient their use, and shape their reception by fears and fantasies that remain fundamentally continuous with visions of AI that date back well before the term was invented. As the editors of Imagining AI put the point, in the pithy first sentence of their introduction: AI “was a cultural phenomenon long before it was a technological one” (3). And such AI was—and, these volumes argue, remains—a diverse phenomenon, “shaped by the particular histories, philosophies, ideologies, religions, narrative traditions, and economic structures of different countries, cultures, and peoples” (4). In this view, we need a historical and cultural poetics of AI to know from whence AI, in its diverse forms and scales, has come, where AI might be going, and what relations of power AI sustains and undermines.The trajectory charted by these related essay collections evinces the evolution, over the past decade, of a specific institutional awareness of these historical and cultural dimensions of AI. The first of them to appear, AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, originated, its acknowledgments tell us, in workshops held in 2017 and 2018 by “the AI Narratives project, a joint initiative of the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge and the Royal Society” (xiii). The history AI Narratives develops is very much a Western one, and its essays move forward along a familiar timeline. A sprightly first chapter by Genevieve Liveley and Sam Thomas details the automata and other intelligent devices depicted by Homer in book 18 of the Iliad and elsewhere. Treatments of relevant medieval and early modern figures follow, with standout chapters from E. R. Truitt, on demonic or otherwise preternatural notions of augmented or artificial intelligence, such as magic mirrors and mechanical sentries, and from Julie Park, on eighteenth-century speaking machines. The collection's second half, about which more will be said below, then surveys “modern and contemporary” AI narratives.Without narrowing the broad temporal sweep its predecessor volume AI Narratives covers, Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines globalizes the scope of the inquiry. The attention Imagining AI pays to the whole world corresponds, it seems, to a reorganization of the AI Narrative project, circa 2018, into “the Global AI Narratives (GAIN) project at the Leverhulme Centre.” The essays this volume includes emerged from twenty workshops organized there between 2018 and 2021, some of them virtual or hybrid. After an introductory chapter that usefully parses what vocabularies different languages use to grapple with artificial intelligence, these contributions are “clustered geographically” to “group chapters from similar linguistic or cultural backgrounds” (7). A third associated volume, Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, edited by Jude Browne, Stephen Cave, Eleanor Drage, and Kerry McInerney, was published at the end of 2023.The Leverhulme Centre's various Narrative AI projects int