Imagining a digital archaeology doctoral thesis in 2450, a phd student carefully sifting through the computational ruins of a society in perplexity, wondering at the insane collective delusion that suddenly caused these people to all at once start rebuilding the load bearing foundations of society with tools labelled “for entertainment purposes only”, wondering what conclusions they’ll draw. A cognitive recurrence of the mass psychosis dance manias or laugh contagions of the Middle Ages, maybe?
@mhoye I don't think that the real violence has even started yet.
Mark Dingemanse (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image New! Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies https://zenodo.org/records/19452872 Why do Anthropic engineers talking to Claude sound like Azande witch doctors addressing their potions? What does Mambila spider divination have in common with prompt engineering? Why are LLMs so irresistible to interact with? If you're interested in questions like that, and in luminaries like Lovelace, Adorno, Suchman and Weizenbaum, you may be interested in this paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19452872

Scholar Social
@mhoye all such analogies make it sound way cooler than it is. "my new shitty boss is a computer. but i love it bc i am now a shitty boss to other computers (plus humans i never see)" - so much more bleak and clinical than garden variety human mysticisms.
historians are going to place all of it right next to sports betting and The Human Centipede under an exhibit name like A Troubled Era or smth.