In the previous episode, we heard how so-called artificial intelligence is being sold to the public as a revolutionary, inevitable technology that is going to completely transform society. This claim is built around the misleading metaphor of “artificial intelligence,” which equates machine processes with human intelligence. Generative AI products are being marketed as proof that machines will very soon be doing everything a human can do, but better, faster, and more efficiently. We’re being told we can’t stop this technology. Only learn to live with it.

In this episode, we’re going to show how so-called generative AI is not revolutionary. Instead, it’s an evolution of societal trends that have been a long time in the making and which were not inevitable…Things like the automation of labor, growth of mass media, and vast increases in monopoly power. By understanding this context we can get a much clearer picture of what so-called generative AI actually is, what the companies behind it are really up to, and all the ways it can affect our lives.

This is Media Objects. A Ways of Knowing podcast. Produced by the World According to Sound, in partnership with Media Studies at Cornell University. Support from the college of arts and science and the society for the humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming.

Guests include Cornell professors Steven Jackson, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Daniel Susser, Lee Humphreys, and Chris Csikszentmihalyi.