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On the machinic qualities of human interaction and the human qualities of the machine

There’s a tendency in reactions to GAI to draw a dichotomy between the human and the machine while fails to account for the machinic qualities which typically govern human interaction. For example as Natale puts it in Deceitful Media loc 2008:

Think, for instance, of highly formalized interactions such as exchanges with a phone operator, or the standardized movements of telegraphists, whose actions were later automated through mechanization. Even in everyday life, it is not uncommon to describe a person who repeats the same sentences or does not convey emotion through language as acting or talking “like a machine.”

Within bureaucracies routine tasks will take on machinic qualities, with human creativity subordinated to a predetermined sequence of steps which an individual must follow. Under capitalism creative production is governed to varying degrees by concern about market and audience, with human creativity subordinated to instrumental concerns and commercial analysis. The machinic quality to human creativity is already ubiquitous and this is the context in which GAI is being taken up.

In contrast LLMs are trained on human creativity. Certainly through enclosure but relying on creativity nonetheless, even if produced under the aforementioned conditions. Furthermore, as Natale points out on loc 2481: “The fact that “the locus and nature of the digital interlocutor is not uniform in people’s minds” is a result of the high degree of participation that is required from the user.” Their operation relies upon, rather exploitatively one might say, human interlocutors to fuel their operation and fill in the blanks in their responses, as part of a long history of what Natale calls Deceitful Media. As he puts it on loc 216, “Studies in human-computer interaction consistently show that users interacting with computers apply norms and behaviors that they would adopt with humans, even if these users perfectly understand the difference between computers and humans.”

Their is a machinic character to the human and a human character to the machinic. I’m not trying to collapse the distinction between them but simply illustrate how the idea of a stark dichotomy is unhelpful.

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