I had the pleasure of participating in Dialogues on Digital Society‘s inaugural issue, in their book/culture review forum, with my Stony Brook University colleague Katherine Johnston. We were asked to review an artwork on display at SBU’s Zuccaire Gallery called “Eye to Eye” by Josie Williams, then an MFA student at SBU. Our review is available open access from Sage.
“By using LLMs to voice each perspective, Williams captures how the consolidation of power structures and stonewalls any discussions of meaningful change–especially under the false pretenses of everyone having an equal voice, supposedly convened and empowered by technology. Without agency or power, the machinic “think tank” stagnates in an endless loop of concerns and competing interests, and with each additional utterance–and the computing power and energy it demands–the urgency of the violence in the Congo mounts. Thus, generative AI emerges as a beneficiary of the very problem Williams has prompted it to discuss: the more text it generates (however important), the more battery power is needed.”
—Salzano and Johnston
Dialogues on Digital Society uses “open peer review,” which means the artist got to read all of our reviews and then write a response. You can read Josie Williams’s response to her reviewers here.
Matthew Salzano, Ph.D. 