“Unsituated knowledge” and the lack of a “world model” in so-called “AI"

In 1988, Donna Haraway proposed the concept of "situated knowledges" grounded in individual and community perspectives, as opposed to knowledge grounded in "a conquering gaze from nowhere". Gary Marcus has criticized Large Language Models and what Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna call their "synthetic text-extruding machines" (STEMs) for lacking

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Fascinating how concepts in the humanities so often become separated from their embeddedness in specific knowledge situations, and become instead universalised as transcendental buzzwords. We could perhaps start a list. It’s happened to ‘materiality’. (And maybe ‘open’ and ‘commons’.) Could we say it’s even happened to ‘situated knowledges’ itself?

#material #open #commons #situatedknowledges