Talk
Human-Machine Loops and the Future of Creativity, Literature and Culture
Rodney H. Jones
University of Reading
In this talk, I consider the future of creativity, literature and culture through the lens of recent posthumanist approaches to language and education (Pennycook, 2017). The rise of generative AI has sparked debates, both in the humanities and in the cognitive sciences, about the potential effects of technology on human culture and creativity (Brinkmann et al., 2023; Jones, 2024). But such debates are not entirely new. Human culture has always emerged from our symbiotic relationship with tools of various kinds (Clark, 2003), and the rise of new technologies has always required that we readjust our understanding of how we fit into different ‘human-machine loops’ (Knowles, 2024). The question is what form this readjustment will take as humanities educators grapple with the new capabilities of generative AI. Drawing on socio-materialist approaches to human agency and ethics (Barad, 2007) and posthumanist approaches to creativity (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022), I propose a model for helping students think through their participation in human-machine loops with generative AI which involves reflecting on their processes of interfacing – the ways they perform ‘agential cuts’ between themselves as the tools they are using -- inferencing – the ways they formulate inferential strategies to understand how these tools work -- and imagining – the ways interacting with these tools prompts them to construct socio-technical imaginaries not just about the nature of machine ‘intelligence’ and ‘creativity’, but also about the nature of human intelligence and creativity. I illustrate this model with data collected in an ongoing project where students work together in the context of ‘AI makerspaces’ to create and critique their own AI agents as a way of (re)imagining new, ‘more-than-human’ possibilities for creativity and learning.
This talk is a part of the Language, Literature & Culture Study in an Age of AI Conference.
Bio:
Rodney H. Jones is Professor of Sociolinguistics in the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading. His research interests include language and digital media, health communication, language and sexuality, and language and creativity. His recent books include Understanding Digital Literacies: A practical introduction, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2021), Viral Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Introducing Language and Society, (Cambridge University Press, 2022). His new book, Innovations and Challenges in Digital Literacies, will soon be published by Routledge.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Brinkmann, L., Baumann, F., Bonnefon, J.-F., Derex, M., Müller, T. F., Nussberger, A.-M., Czaplicka, A., Acerbi, A., Griffiths, T. L., Henrich, J., Leibo, J. Z., McElreath, R., Oudeyer, P.-Y., Stray, J., & Rahwan, I. (2023). Machine culture. Nature Human Behaviour, 7(11), 1855–1868. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01742-2
Clark, A. (2003). Natural born cyborgs: Minds, technologies, and the future of human intelligence. Oxford University Press.
Harris, D., & Holman Jones, S. (2022). A manifesto for posthuman creativity studies. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), 522–530. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211066632
Jones, R. H. (2024). Culture machines. Applied Linguistics Reviewhttps://doi.org/10.1515/applirev-2024-0188
Knowles, A. M. (2024). Machine-in-the-loop writing: Optimizing the rhetorical load. Computers and Composition, 71, 102826. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2024.102826
Pennycook, A. (2017). Posthumanist applied linguistics. Routledge.
Friday, February 7, 2025
B-4 Dwinelle & Zoom, 10-11:30 am
This lecture is sponsored by the College of Letters and Science.
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