There’s an interesting discussion in Simon Lindgren’s Critical Theory of AI (pg 37-38) about we imagine the assemblage. He quotes Tarleton Gillespie’s concern that the notion obscures “the people involved at every point: people debating the models, cleaning the training data, designing the algorithms, tuning the parameters” before quoting Nick Seaver arguing that we should not imagine assemblages as “standalone little boxes” but instead as “massive, networked ones with hundreds of hands reaching into them, tweaking and tuning, swapping out parts and experimenting with new arrangements”. I found this an evocative and disturbing image, generated here by ChatGPT:
It suddenly occurs to me how powerfully image generation AI can be used to support theoretical discussion.
Mark Carrigan 