Collaborators:
Alondra Nelson
Moira Weigel
Carina Albrecht
Yuxing Zhang

Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Narratives of AI (SINAI)

From mechanical automata to ethereal sentients, conceptualizations of artificial intelligence have carried with them society's hopes and fears, as well as ideas about humanity and its future. More recently, generative AI tools like ChatGPT have been a focal point for narratives and imaginaries about the perils and possibilities of technology, which are already having real-world impacts: in proposed legislation that anticipates that AI will gain autonomy and awareness; in employment forecasts that proclaim AI will eradicate many jobs; in predictions of seamless language translation by polyglot chatbots that will eliminate barriers to communication and exchange; and through extrapolations that transformed AI supply chains will restructure the planetary order. What the rapid introduction of ChatGPT made clear was that the stories being told about generative AI by industry, the media, politicians, and others conjured worlds well beyond AI's current technical capabilities. What kinds of effects might these imaginaries and narratives about generative AI have on policy, markets, geopolitics, knowledge creation, and beyond—whether or not they prove accurate? 

The SINAI project examines the sociotechnical narratives and imaginaries that have emerged with the introduction of generative AI and asks how they give rise to and shape social action and potential futures. Despite the centrality of generative AI to today’s sociotechnical narratives and imaginaries, we do not yet have a rich accounting of them. As sociotechnical objects that are at once the subject of narratives and sites of narrative production, AI tools offer a provocation to conventional humanities and interpretive social science approaches. How should we conceptualize and enact interpretation after the introduction of generative AI?

We aim to address this challenge by deepening scholarly understanding of the discourses surrounding generative AI and developing a novel methodology that bridges traditional interpretive methods and technical analysis. To that end, we bring together discourse analysis of AI narratives in media, industry, and public sources; textual reading of fiction, memoir, and essays; examination of chatbot outputs as sites of narrative construction; and comparative analysis of global AI imaginaries. Through this work, we trace how AI imaginaries do not merely describe technological futures but actively call them into being—with consequences for politics, culture, economy, and knowledge itself.