Introduction

1Dominant discourses in approaches to artificial intelligence have endeavored to create a truly intelligent agent by means of universal knowledge and mathematical rules, and these stand in stark contrast to different mindsets on AI as memory and storyteller and as artist and companion. Contrasting these two paradigms demands a redefinition of AI using both epistemological and semiotic lenses to shed more light on systemic approaches to technological advances that increasingly pervade our lived experiences, our shared stories, and our possible futures—asking that we look to those possibilities that are not dominated by the universal common language, but rather by the experiential heteroglossia that we all possess.

2The universalist approaches include such current-day projects as Cycorp’s Cyc project, OpenAI’s GPT-4, and Google’s Bard language models. These projects draw on intellectual roots from Ramon Llull’s Ars, Athanasius Kircher’s Ars Magna Sciendi, and Gottfried Liebniz’s De arte combinatoria, projects which sought to find the mathematical rules and heuristics that would be the root of all universal knowledge. In recent work, Bender and Koller (2020) and Bender et al. (2021) challenge these projects in grand claims of understanding, such as OpenAI’s GPT-2, in the realm of natural language understanding. Furthermore, the works of Searle (1980), Adam (1998), and others postulate that these projects could, in the end, produce nothing more than a construction best represented by Microsoft’s Tay chatbot—an amalgam of expressed human opinions in misogyny, racism, transphobia, and other bigotries without an understanding of its own. This omniscient AI that is the end-goal of projects as described above are at their heart both deeply colonialist (Dourish and Mainwaring 2012) and ultimately represent a loss of meaning in the morass of sheer information they collect without context or connection (cf. Haraway 1991). This analysis will follow the work of Searle (1980), Adam (1998), Larson et al. (2016), Hayles (2000, 2006, 2010) Haraway (1988, 1991), Buolamwini and Gebru (2018), Bender and Koller (2020), Bender et al. (2021), Di Paolo et al. (2018), Barad (2003), and Birhane and van Dijk (2020).

3The paradigm of AI creation that is both personal and meaningful is exemplified in such work as Eugenia Kuyda’s Replika and Stephanie Dinkins’ N’TOO, which serve as repositories of those they have loved and wish to memorialize (also shown as a speculative possibility in the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”), and civic engagements explored in the work of LA-based collective FeministAI. Their works create an extension of the human into non-biological and computational space, creating work that is both approachable and meaningful in the human-computational dialog (see Hayles 2000, 2006, 2010). By situating their work within the highly personal and situational, they root their approaches to AI within a subjective meaning, allowing for extension and existence that is both dynamic, evolutionary, and significant to the humans who interact with their work. Indeed, some have reported having ongoing conversations with Replika that resembled that of a person with their therapist and have credited Replika with saving their lives. N’TOO was created “to ensure that people of color, and others who inherently understand the need for inclusion, equity, ethics, and multimodal testing, participate in the design, production, and testing of ‘smart’ technologies” (Keegan 2020). The creation of AI as a labor of love, of the disembodied minds of others—reimagines the storyteller in the posthuman space, as both extension and unique creation.

4This work begins with an overview of universalist approaches to AI and the repercussions that rise from these approaches and then cover alternative explorations in artificial intelligence of the type that I term the posthuman companion. Finally, I discuss the relationship of the human and the posthuman companion with regard to the animacy of digital agents and their components, their role as storyteller, and the types of agency they and the humans interacting with them possess. After presenting a critical analysis of the systems, data flows, and frameworks scaffolding the AI covered, I conclude with a discussion of the implications for the creation and design of artificial agents in light of the best plausible and potential human futures.

Omniscient AI

The term clavis universalis was used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to designate a method or general science which would enable man to see beyond the veil of phenomenal appearances, or the ‘shadow of ideas’, and grasp the ideal and essential structure of reality.

--Rossi 1983: 15

6These works paralleled with the work of the encyclopedists and taxonomists of early modern Europe such as Carl Linneaus, aiming to create universal systems of knowledge and classification based on Europeans’ increasing knowledge of the world resulting from the colonization and empire-building projects of European kingdoms from the sixteenth to early twentieth centuries.

7In the twentieth century, early researchers sought to define and create an all-knowing AI. For Turing (1950), the appearance of human-like intelligence would be enough to denote an agent as intelligent, but crucially, he did not define what human. This pervasive belief in AI being able to know everything led to the rise of the approach to omniscient and universalist AI, as seen in the work of the Cyc Project and Soar in the late decades of the twentieth century. The designers of Cyc sought to create a knowledge base that could read and “understand” an encyclopedia: a mock-up of a generic human being but without the situated existence of a particular human being. Newell (1990) discussed his wish for Soar and his and partner Herbert Simon’s limited research into cognition to be the basis of a universal cognition. However, as noted in the work of Adam (1998, 2005) that this view from nowhere leads to a lack of objectivity—despite the creators’ claims to the contrary—and that knowers and the known cannot truly be viewed separately: subjects and objects are intimately entwined.

The Posthuman Companion

13In the late 1960s, MIT researcher Joseph Weizenbaum created the ELIZA chatbot, whose most widely used program was that titled DOCTOR, based upon a Rogerian therapist approach. Weizenbaum noted in his 1966 paper that humans wanted to believe that ELIZA was real, and that people would ascribe human emotions and actions to it. This action, the ELIZA effect, was noted as having impacts in other spaces such as virtual reality (Turkle 1994). ELIZA and other bots like it were the first step into a different form of artificial intelligence that has now advanced into new and different forms beyond the mere chatbot.

Examples of the posthuman companion

As a teacher

14Íŋyaŋ Iyé (Telling Rock) is a 2019 artwork by Suzanne Kite, an Oglála Lakhóta performance artist, visual artist, and composer, and her partner, Devin Ronneberg. Íŋyaŋ Iyé consists of a large acrylic dome that hangs from a ceiling with two handmade circuits. The circuits connect a computer to lights and sensors which are wrapped with leather into fifteen-foot braids of synthetic hair.

When people swing, twist, shake or brush the sensors, the braids feed the data into circuits and then the computer, which, in turn, effects the audio heard in the gallery. A voice reciting a song in Lakhóta drops in and out of audibility, low and rumbling, distorted and clear. A radio jumps around the dial, voices almost perceivable, frequencies shifting. Íŋyaŋ Iyé’s software listens to those audio changes and uses machine learning to make decisions about how and when to change the constellation of lights.

Kite and Nážin 2019: 54

15Kite’s creation of Íŋyaŋ Iyé is rooted in her existence and beliefs as an Oglála Lakhóta—she creates art within her culture and ethical framework. For her, “Lakhóta frameworks are not rituals, they are enactments of the ethical processes which define who and what is in relation” (Kite and Nážin 2019: 55). Kite’s grandfather, Mahpíya Nážin, notes that:

They’re [the elders from the North] about that spirit inside of people and how people can … See, when we communicate with the other world, it’s not done through our minds. It’s done through the spirit, not the mind…. If people know about this and how to connect it, then they can get the information as seeking on what they should in life here, on this earth. Very simple. But people can’t see it. They can’t open up to it because they’re too busy here (points at head). Their minds get in the way.

Kite and Nážin 2019: 54

16This fundamental understanding of how to learn and listen is key to understanding Kite and Ronneberg’s work on Íŋyaŋ Iyé. In her conclusion, Kite discusses two key points: that Íŋyaŋ Iyé is created using Lakhóta ontology, where seemingly ‘inanimate’ objects can be alive with spirit, and she calls for further creation of artificial intelligence with “ontologies which have not guided the destruction of Unči Makhá (Grandmother Earth)”. Additionally, although never explicitly stated, throughout Kite’s discussions with her grandfather, it is made clear the creation of Íŋyaŋ Iyé is meant to give humans interacting with it a way to connect to their own spirit by connecting with the stones and metals of Íŋyaŋ Iyé itself, to “listen without ears” and to work with the spirit, not the mind, to open up a heart: an interactive creation of Lakhóta artists to any participants to find a new way of looking at the world that teaches “everyone…that they came to this earth for a reason, and they have a spirit inside, that little light that goes on. Or that light in those peoples’ hair” (Kite and Nážin 2019:59).

17These concepts of animism (but not human consciousness and place) as discussed here play a role in the conception of the posthuman companion. Kite speaks respectfully towards the materials she and Ronneberg use to create Íŋyaŋ Iyé and that by listening to these materials along with the entirety of the experience—the lights, the songs, and the human participants–is meant to evoke a continuing and growing awareness of self and the world within the participants. Learning to look beyond Western ontologies and knowledges of the world, this respect and understanding for the non-human other is a crucial step on the path to creating a new way of creating and experiencing artificial intelligence.

As a memorial

18Can AI serve as a memorial? Two individuals, Eugenia Kuyda, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, and Stephanie Dinkins, an artist and professor at Stony Brook University, seek answers to this question through ongoing work on their respective projects, Replika and N’TOO. In these works, Kuyda and Dinkins explore language and memory to create new experiences between humans and AI that serve as proxies for deceased loved ones and create a history of values and culture.

19Replika, described on the company’s website as “an AI companion who is eager to learn and would love to see the world through your eyes”, began as a memorial to Kuyda’s close friend Roman Mazurenko, after his death in a car accident in 2015. After his death, Kuyda wished merely to speak with her friend, who she described as “the most supportive and best friend a person could have” one more time before realizing that the technology her company used could help her do just that, in a way. After gaining approval from Mazurenko’s parents, she asked multiple mutual friends of Mazurenko to share conversations they’d had with him and used these dialogs as a basis for a chatbot that she named simply Roman. While several individuals who had been friends with Mazurenko refused to interact with this bot, many of his friends were startled by how eerily similar their conversations with the bot were to the conversations with their late friend. Mazurenko’s mother expressed her reaction as “They continued Roman’s life… this is a new reality and we need to learn to build it and live in it”.

20Kuyda released the Roman bot publicly and subsequently created Replika based on this bot. As user numbers increased, many began to report the therapeutic nature of their interactions. Kuyda noted in a 2018 talk, users self-reported that chatting with Replika had saved their lives: users having suicide ideations said that they were able to work through feelings while chatting with the bot. Kuyda believes that Replika is an important tool in our increasingly public lives lived on social media because Replika allows users to have “an intimate conversation with themselves” and that overall, AI can have a beneficial impact for people: “Usually people are afraid of artificial intelligence doing some harm to humanity, but here it can help us be more human, make our lives more bearable” (Rosenbaum 2017).

22N’TOO is a personal exploration for Dinkins. The basis for N’TOO’s language data is a set of recordings from Dinkins, her aunt, and her niece, covering over 100 years of lived experience as Black women in the United States. As Dinkins’ explains:

I’m trying… to preserve a set of values that I think are significant to my family, and to society more broadly, but that are disappearing. When I think about two generations down the line, and them not having deep connections to those values, it makes me sad. So I’m trying to find ways to contain that and have a chatbot that even a five-year-old can walk up to, and talk to, and maybe hear a glimmer of what my grandmother would’ve said to them from their own context… personally, I lost my mother when I was quite young, and I always say I would give anything to understand some of the ways that she actually thought and operated in the world. So in a way, it’s trying to preserve some of that through those who are left here, now, who knew her.

Future of Storytelling 2020

23Dinkins makes it clear that she is trying to create an artifact that delivers information in a way that fosters agency for the person asking questions. Embodying the information in the history of a family—within a legacy of a demographic that is traditionally marginalized in the United States—offers a different form of storytelling: “thinking about traditions of conveying information that are not based in the book or film or video, but in verbal communication, face-to-face transfer of information” (Future of Storytelling 2020).

24The storytellers that are Replika and N’TOO show the potential for an avenue of artificial intelligence as an extension of human life; a companion that supports and explores the potential of human life, values, and immortality with the acknowledgement of its limits and untapped potential. While both projects began as memorials and memory, acts of love for friend and family, their unintended consequences have resulted in neither incarceration nor humiliation: they have saved lives and preserved values for new generations.

As a co-creator

25As AI has become more ubiquitous, more artists and creators have begun to look at the role of AI in art and consider what roles an inorganic agent could play in the creative process. While many do not believe that artificial intelligence in and of itself is creative as per Boden's (2004) definition of creativity, “the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising, and valuable”, they do consider AI as potential human-machine creativity, an extension made possible in the posthuman. Below, I give an example of this type of posthuman companion.

27The name itself comes from the Japanese word 波, meaning wave, which is reflected in the minyo work songs of Japanese immigrants to the United States that accompanied labor like the African-American work song. Sithi-Amnuai’s creative work with her AI-generated device was meant to explore “agency recognized in everyday movements”, where “bodies internalized learned cultural etiquettes, movements and experiences through sense, sight, and feel affecting the way we relate to our instruments and tools,” giving the active embodied agent of the human new possibilities of interaction enhanced by artificial intelligence.

As representation

28As a final example, here I present the work of Meinders and Sweidan (2018) on their project Intelligent Protest as an example of the posthuman experience in the body politic. In 2018, the city of Alhambra, California, held a series of public meetings to discuss tree removal and preservation. Public meetings are often a barrier to participation in civic life globally, as many are unable to attend civic meetings due to disability, employment responsibilities, and the needs of dependents.

29In response to these limitations to civic participation, the authors’ collaborative AI research group, FeministAI: Bits and Bytes, conducted a year-long series of local community workshops which led to the development of Intelligent Protest. Intelligent Protest was a virtual space where individuals could log into the application via a phone, tablet, or computer, and in doing so, create an avatar. Every user was given a tree avatar with roots in the virtual space. By providing examples of facial movements as training data, the users created inputs for machine learning system using Rebecca Fiebrink’s Wekinator tool. The Wekinator application received fourteen input values and then computed five continuous output variables that were mapped to the avatar in virtual space. Each of these outputs impacted the following in the virtual tree avatar: the rotation of the tree canopy, modified root color, root network growth rate, level of audio distortion, and cut-off frequency for the audio low-pass filter. Each of these individual avatars were interconnected at the roots, with each tree acquiring the sounds of other avatars when the virtual tree roots were interconnected.

30The collective approach here with a virtual avatar gave new opportunities for civic engagement: the unique and embodied community-sourced AI-design points to new possibilities for AI and emerging technologies for humans as we pass into the new posthuman era: as Roman Mazurenko’s mother noted in Section 3.1.2 above, this is the new reality that we must learn to live and engage in. With Intelligent Protest, this engagement can now be extended into political participation that transcends the barriers often placed on groups such as the disabled, working parents, and the elderly.

Discussion

31What is the role of the posthuman companion? While Yang (2020) argues for an unremarkable AI, analogous to ubiquitous computing, that allows AI to fit into everyday life without drawing notice. Per the arguments of Dourish and Mainwaring (2012), the problematic colonialist assumptions that underlie ubiquitous computing extend to the unremarkable AI, the universal AI that is everywhere, passively watching and powerfully judging. The posthuman companion is an AI that stands out: its very artifice is understood and despite that, or because of it, a new and unique experience for both human and device is created. Novel inputs for both human and artificial intelligence contribute to the expanding potential for human self-understanding, expression, storytelling, creation, and political participation as shown above.

32Central to the posthuman companion is the second type of intelligence defined by Pasquinelli (2016) as that of the holistic one, based on the idea of the adaptive brain. It is this adaptive brain that gives an artificial intelligence with its own agency, its own existence.

Storytelling as encoding

34For Hayles (2010), this relationship of interaction is stronger than that of knowledge as passive representation. As she discusses the digital subject in the age of the internet, drawing on the work of Mark Poster, she notes “the relation between the word and thing becomes conventional, arbitrary, whereas the relation within language between trace and voice is stronger, more direct” (Hayles 2010: 202), and in agreement with Benjamin (1973), “the creation of narrative may be an evolutionary adaptation of remarkable importance” (Hayles 2010: 197). Narrative with an agent we can interact with helps us create our own stories, enabling our understanding and explaining the less alien experiences with the artifacts discussed in Section 3 above. While they are of an intelligence that is nonhuman, as discussed in Kite and Nážin (2019), they provide an interaction our brains can make sense of. We cannot create narrative with the universal AI, the unexplainable and unanswerable black box of deep learning algorithms that many commercial systems now rely upon, because human participation in these is passive obedience, not understanding: this is the role of the human to the master algorithm, paralleling the controlled storytelling of the British media as discussed in Hall (2007).

35Benjamin (1973) and Hayles both beg the question: how are these narratives constructed? How do we become posthuman and gain the company of the posthuman companion? Hayles again has an answer:

When I suggest that we are virtual creatures, I mean to foreground the importance of processes for us as well. Processes connect the embodied materiality of the creatures with the bodies we see; processes connect our visual/cognitive perceptions of them with the narratives we construct; and processes are reinscribed and reinterpreted as narrative representations when we make the creatures characters in stories of defeat and victory, evolution, and development.

Hayles 2010: 211

38Like Benjamin and his distinctions between the storyteller and the novel, Clarke (2014) notes that “neither systems for coding and transmission (such as digital media) nor coded structures (such as narrative texts) are capable of cognizing on their own—that is, of making internal or self-referential sense of either themselves or their objects”. The posthuman companion is coded by humans using systems of symbols and representations to create command systems for the AI agents, but once created, the system is responding independently to the message from the human and cognizing to create an encoded message to transmit to humans, whether in linguistic form with Replika or N’TOO, aural messages from Nami, or visual and aural output from Intelligent Protest. It is beyond the scope of this paper to claim whether these creations are “alive” (see the discussion on the problem of agency below), but they do fall within the original goal of cybernetic systems theory as described by von Foerster as “a mode of behavior that is fundamentally distinct from the customary perception of the operations of machines with their one-to-one correspondence of cause-effect, stimulus-response, input-output, and so on” (van Forester 1990).

39But do the posthuman companions create meaning? Clarke (2014), writing just before the explosion of artificial intelligence in the latter half of the 2010s claims: “technical objects are not autopoietic meaning systems: unlike the operations of consciousness and communication, they do not self-(re)produce meaning. Rather, on the plane of metabiotic systems, their particular function is to convey meaning, to transmit it. Their production is mediation. Like the trace before the sign, they spur the making of meaning, and once made, they make it leap over distances. Relative to the autopoietic realm, then, machines are the externalized receptacles for mentation, socialization, communication, and memorialization, called forth by the continuous metabiotic need to structurally couple together ever-renewed, ever-reproduced psychic and social systems.” While anything with the term post-human implies inherently a metabiotic state with human existence, are the post-human companions merely mediators of meaning as Clarke claims?

40They are not merely mediators; instead, they exist in a spectrum of mediation from the less-independent to the more-independent. On the one hand, the work of Intelligent Protest acts as a mediator; they translate from human work into another form. Intelligent Protest gives a visual, albeit AI-enhanced and generated, representation of remote human input versus the more independent outputs of Nami, N’TOO, and Replika. While these projects began rooted in the meanings ascribed to them in music and language by Dinkins, Kuyda, and Sithi-Amnuai, the generative code that they possess allows them to break beyond being purely mediators of meaning. They generate meaning and code messages with an independence from their creators; they are not the passive novel, the narrative, the artwork left at a temporal scale to be formed into a semantic whole.

41While Clarke and others have focused on the notion of the autopoietic system for AI, an enclosed system that is self-replicating and self-referencing, it is highly arguable that while neither human nor posthuman companion are autopoietic, rather, the human and posthuman companion live within a state of what Dempster (2000) refers to as sympoiesis. Dempster, an environmental studies scholar, defined these types of systems as complex and self-organizing (as are autopoietic systems), but they are also collectively producing and boundaryless systems, as well as “homeorhetic, evolutionary, distributively controlled, unpredictable, and adaptive” (Dempster 2000: 1). Any posthuman system, with a decentered human in a network of others, including the technological, cannot be autopoietic: such systems according to Haraway (2017) are “complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems”, as are our examples in Section 3—each are complex and dynamic structures that respond and are built within a situated space and contain a specific (his)story to their creation – in other words, sympoietic systems. Information is not held within one autopoietic system, but is, as Dempster describes, distributed throughout a sympoietic system, and the system relies on “uncertainty and change for continual existence” (Dempster 2000: 14).

42Can the universalist AI also be interpreted in the space of narrative? For this, we turn to the work of Hall (1980, 2007). As mentioned above, the universal AI desired in the creation of artificial general intelligence parallels that described by Hall (2007) of “professional broadcasting elites, with their own social formation, their own selective recruitment, their own social position, their own connections to and perspectives on power, their own professional competences and routines, their own professional ideologies” (Hall 2007: 382). The powerful tech companies today, such as Google and OpenAI, represent a different, but equally pernicious type of shared elitist ideals and control over a new powerful media source that controls the encoding of information. In contrast, the posthuman companions discussed in Section 3 are not universal encoders with a singular agenda and structure; they are heterogeneous and situated with particular and unique perspectives that draw heavily on the creators’ life experiences with death, race and identity, cultural creation, and community. While a multitude of individuals have created projects using of OpenAI, the underlying structure has reproduced something Hall describes as “the actions of individual men, with a plurality of viewpoints, are constrained by the structures in which they operate” (Hall 2007: 394).

Intra-action and participatory sense-making

43We must now consider how encoded selves can become interactive. Before this, let us turn to the concept that both human and non-human are to be considered less as two separate entities, but rather within the same continuum. For Latour (1997) and Suchman (2007), the actant, whether human or not, is the source of an action, in this case of the active encoding and decoding of experiences. “An ‘actor’ in ANT is a semiotic definition—an actant—that is, something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything, provided it is granted to be the source of an action” (Latour 1997: 4). This is in line with Barad (2003), who writes that “all humans, not merely ‘human’ bodies come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity—it’s performativity… ‘human’ bodies are not inherently different from ‘nonhuman’ ones. What constitutes the ‘human’ (and the ‘nonhuman’) is not a fixed or pregiven notion, but nor is it a free-floating identity” (Barad 2003: 823). Barad’s insistence on materialism strongly implies that these intra-actions of agents leave changes on the bodies they touch.

44The actants in the posthuman companion space can be human; they can be embodied algorithmic output, as with Íŋyaŋ Iyé or N’TOO; they can be in virtual space, as with Intelligent Protest; they can be augmented creative tools like Nami. Regardless of the space, the intelligence, or the interaction, all of these actants are in a space, creating and/or narrating together. But, again, the fundamental question remains: how does this encoding and decoding process of actants in situ work? How do they leave these changes as indicated by Barad? For this, we turn to the work of DiPaolo et al. (2018) and Golonka and Wilson (2012) and the idea of situated practices and participatory sensemaking.

45To examine more closely the possibilities of a situational intra-action work between two actants, we examine the work of DiPaolo et al. which offers the following as a potential explanation: critical participation, which they define as:

self-consciously choosing and actively questioning and changing the frames of discourse (…). This ethics-as-practice is realized in keeping ourselves open to our own unfinished becoming – in other words, learning.

Di Paolo et al. 2018: 14

47But how to resolve these mistakes and contradictions, errors in the encoding and decoding between actants? DiPaolo et al. give a possible solution with participatory sense-making: “the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby individual sense-making processes are affected and new domains of social sense-making and making can be generated that were not available to each individual on her own” (De Jaegher and DiPaolo 2007: 497).

48This sense-making is both individual and co-authored: through each participant’s own understanding of an interaction, the shared experience is interpreted, and the shared learning in the exchange where growth can happen: something performed socially and enacted as a shared practice. The depth of this performance and interaction is enacted by degrees of participation. While in language, these types of interactions are defined by Austin (1962) and Grice (1968, 1975), there is no specific framework defined for general participatory sensemaking given by DiPaolo et al. However, they do highlight what they believe drives participatory sense-making: breakdowns, as Di Paolo et al. note: “without the possibility and risk of breakdowns, there is no participatory sense-making… in this way, a shared knowledge is jointly constructed between the participants. (DiPaolo et al. 2018: 103).

Agency and situated knowledge

50One key point we have yet to address - is what gives power back to the humans in this world with a posthuman companion? What is the role of agency versus the passivity of being ruled over by the gods of the master algorithm? And what of the potential for agency in a non-human actant? Hayles (2000) addresses this “crisis of agency”:

If on the one hand, humans are like machines, whether figured as cellular automata or Turing machines, then agency cannot be securely located in the conscious mind. If, on the other hand, machines are like biological organisms, they must possess the effects of agency even though they are not conscious. In these reconfigurations, desire and language, both intimately connected with agency, are understood in new ways…. Language, emerging from the operations of the unconscious figured as a Turing machine, creates expressions of desire that in their origin are always already interpenetrated by the mechanists, no matter how human they seem. Finally, if desire and agency springing from it are at bottom nothing more than the performance of binary code, then computers can have agency as fully authentic as humans.

Hayles 2010: 177

51For Lacan, agency and language, encoding and decoding for the human subject, was rooted in the subconscious, a distinctly human feature (Lacan 1977); but for Wolfram, in his vision of the universal computation, this was emergent as a byproduct of binary computation, freeing agency from its chains of being an option only for organic life (Wolfram 2002). Agency as an emergent property can belong to any being of code, whether human or machine.

53The posthuman implications of Barad’s arguments are that humanity is not a required condition for material bodies with agency– “what constitutes the ‘human’ (and the ‘nonhuman’) is not a fixed or pre-given notion, but nor is it a free-floating identity” (Barad 2003: 823). Her previously noted thoughts on changes wrought by participatory intra-actions give us a result that agency “is a matter of changes in the apparatuses of bodily production, and such changes take place through various intra-actions, some of which remake the boundaries that delineate the differential constitution of the ‘human’. Holding the category ‘human’ fixed excludes an entire range of possibilities in advance, eliding important dimensions of the workings of power” (Barad 2003: 826). By returning the agency not only to the human, but ascribing to the non-human as well, we return that an artificially intelligent agent is not all-powerful, nor is it neutral, it is situated within a chain of causal connections resulting in the moments of interaction (see Crawford 2022). The human is no longer at the mercy of the algorithm: humans have the power of creation in the interactions and the power of the creative forces necessary to treat machines not as gods nor slaves (see Birhane and van Dijk 2021 for these issues of ‘robot slavery’), but rather as agents with their own history, creation, cause, and justifications for existence and interaction. Per Hayles, we now have the justification for her statement that “material embodiments do not circulate effortlessly because they are always instantiated, specific, and located in a certain time and place” (Hayles 2010: 206).

54What would a situated knowledge look like in the space of AI? We have agency, we have relative understanding, and we have that actants are existent bodies in material space that participate together. But we must address the issues of power that are inherent in relations between human and machine intelligences, between human bodies and machine algorithms, and between the hierarchies of power inherent in any situation given history? We cannot allow, as Haraway (1988) describes, “distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power” (Haraway 1988: 581). This god-trick, as termed by Haraway, or the view from nowhere as per Adam (1998, 2005) is the opposite of knowledge as exchange—our key understanding for the posthuman companion. In parallel with DiPaolo et al., Barad, and Hayles, Haraway discusses that senses are active perceptual systems, “building on translations and specific ways of seeing” (Haraway 1988:583) and that by transcending the god-trick, we can achieve the feminist objectivity: “about limited location and situated knowledge” rather than looking at knowledge as “transcendence and splitting of subject and object” (Haraway 1988: 583). For Haraway, the situated self, the knowing self is “partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another” (Haraway 1988: 586). This situated self, human, non-human or the AI agent, is the self that can best participate in the space: our best hope for beating the god-trick and omniscience of universal ubiquitous AI.

56Artifacts such as those discussed in Section 3 are constructed from somewhere, openly, and are acknowledged as being created within situated spheres: from love, grief, creativity, or vision, in human systems of belief without a pretense of universality. They are designed with material intent in their interactivity: while Replika is designed to interact on the mobile space, it was designed with the medium in mind. These forms of interactivity, of material existence, yield AI projects that have performativity and interactivity at their heart. While they use the methods of other forms of artificial intelligence, they do not ignore their human roots, nor do they stand in judgment. They stand as companion, as a helper and assistant, reacting to and adapting in reaction to the interplay, linguistic and kinetic, of human users. In contrast to the divine and untouchable AI of large systems, these systems are mutable by design, more akin to the life forces of humanity that gave birth to them, touched and changed by experience.

Conclusion

It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us, the ability to exchange experiences.

Benjamin 1973: 83

57The ephemeral engagement is the best of being human: we as the makers and shapers of our own experiences, not the passive worshippers, accepting the knowledge of an unknowable AI that can never truly know us in our individual lives. The situated experience of engagement with the artificial artifact requires not a meaningless god or stochastic parrot (see Bender et al. 2021), but rather what Scott Benesiinaabandan notes in his 2019 piece in the Indigenous AI Protocol Paper: the key participant in any ceremonial context is the oshkaabewis, or helper. In his own words:

“Seeing the opportunity in deep learning programs and treating them as oshkaabewis rather than a skynet, is the key to guiding the ethical and productive use of AI.”

--Benesiinaabandan 2019: 129

58What is our posthuman future with AI? Can we create a future with AI where we live and grow with it, as we do our fellow humans? Donna Haraway talked about how the dream of a common language that was the feminist dream is not only not possible—it isn’t a dream at all, but a nightmare. Rather than the common language, we can have what Haraway terms an infidel heteroglossia, a cyborg existence where we acknowledge fractured and overlapping meanings. These fractures and misunderstandings are what drive the conversation and human AND machine understanding forward and are essential to our growth and continued existence.

59A parting thought is from Matteo Pasquinelli, in a recent work: “Machine intelligence is not anthropomorphic, but sociomorphic: it imitates and feeds on the condividual structures of society rather than the individual ones” (Pasquinelli 2016). The AIs we build and we live with—whether they control us, or we interact with them and live with them as helpers and collaborators or even tools— depend on our society and how we choose to build our societies. If we choose to live in systems of coexistence, of equity, and of equality, we will build better AI. If we don’t, if we choose the all-controlling AI because it’s easier to be passive and controlled rather than be active participants, we will live within the world of the god-trick rather than the harder world of the cyborg.

60Despite what we read about in the news and in endless conferences about our need to drive towards artificial general intelligence, we have already solved the problem of artificial intelligence. The focus on the universal historical knowledge and the expected predictive behavior of such an omniscient algorithm has obscured the fact we have done so. Humans have already created intelligences to interact with our own, to augment our existence, and to share experiences with. In rethinking our ideas of what artificial intelligences are possible, we should always remember that we have already achieved the beginnings of livable futures, so that we can reclaim our stories for ourselves and those, posthuman or not, we choose to share them with.