Off Center

In episode six of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta and Hanna Lauvli geek out with Santtu Raisanen, doctoral researcher at the Center for Consumer Society at The University of Helsinki, about the pervasive concept of convenience in contemporary algorithmic culture.

What happens when you drop generative AI into the middle of a liberal arts curriculum? This week on Off Center, Scott sits down with Davis Schneiderman at Lake Forest College to find out. We dive into the HUMAN project, a campus-wide experiment putting AI tools directly into the hands of humanities students and professors. Instead of panicking or running from the tech, Davis argues that writers, artists, and historians need to get their hands dirty with AI to actually understand and critique it. From historical Chicago chatbots to the future of experimental fiction, this conversation explores why the creative critical thinking skills taught in the humanities are our best defense in an AI-driven world.

References

 Burroughs, W. S., & Gysin, B. (1978). The Third Mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Mind

Chamberlain, W., & Thomas Ettrick [Racter]. (1984). The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Policeman%27s_Beard_Is_Half_Constructed

Grossman, J. R., Keating, A. D., & Reiff, J. L. (Eds.). (2004). The Encyclopedia of Chicago. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/

Gysin, B. (1960). I AM THAT I AM [Audio / Permutation poem]. https://www.ubu.com/sound/gysin.html

Lake Forest College. (n.d.). Humanity’s Understanding of the Machine-Assisted Nexus (HUMAN) https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/krebs-center-for-the-humanities

Sanchez Burr, D. (2025). Redshift https://morethanmeetsai.uib.no/

Schneiderman, D., & [Kelly]. (2025). You Can Call Me AI 

Taylor, T. (2025). Serious Game 

In episode five of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta is joined by Anya Shchetvina, PhD fellow with the Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms research group at the Humboldt University in Berlin, to hear about her current work on internet manifestos.

References

Barlow, John Perry (1996) A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

Blankenship, Loyd (1986) The Conscience of a Hacker. http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html

Cheng, Jack (2012) The Slow Web. http://jackcheng.com/the-slow-web

Feminist Server Project. (2014) Feminist Server Manifesto 0.01 / Transfeminist Server Wishlist.https://bakonline.org/en/research+publications/prospections/a+wishlist+for+trans+feminist+servers/

Haraway, Donna (1985) A Cyborg Manifesto. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/donna-haraway-a-cyborg-manifesto

Le Guin, Ursula K. (2024) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction

Lialina, Olia. (2005) A Vernacular Web. http://art.teleportacia.org/observation/vernacular/

Old Boys Network. 1997. 100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism (Referenced as "one hundred and ninety theses on Cyberfeminism"). https://obn.org/cfundef/100antitheses.html

Reynolds, Simon (2011) Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865479944

Sadgrl.online (2021) Sad Girl Online Webmaster Manifesto. https://sadgrl.online/

Turner, Fred. (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773602.html

VNS Matrix. 1991. A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century. https://vnsmatrix.net/projects/the-cyberfeminist-manifesto-for-the-21st-century

What are “World Models,” and why should we care? Could AI really understand reality? Scott and Jhave sit down to explore the rise of World Models - the "engines" of machine intuition -to discuss how quickly they are evolving and what their existence means for the future of humanity (and the robots living alongside us)

References

Agarwal, N. et al. (2025) Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03575

ByteDance. (2025) Lumine: An Open Recipe for Building Generalist Agents in 3D Open Worlds. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08892

DeepMind SIMA Team. (2025) SIMA 2: A Generalist Embodied Agent for Virtual Worlds. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04797

Deng, J. et al. (2009) ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5206848

Fisher, C., Coover, R., & Julian. (2026) [Untitled AR Skiing Project]. [No public URL available for this in-development project]

Li, F.-F. (2025) From Words to Worlds: Spatial Intelligence is AI's Next Frontier. https://drfeifei.substack.com/p/from-words-to-worlds-spatial-intelligence

Mao, J. et al. (2025) Robot Learning from a Physical World Model https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07416

PAN Team, MBZUAI. (2025) PAN: A World Model for General, Interactable, and Long-Horizon World Simulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09057

Powers, R. (2000) Plowing the Dark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowing_the_Dark

Did you know slop was a problem long before AI? This episode of Off Center takes us all the way back to the 18th century as today’s host, Jill Walker Rettberg, discuss the precursors to AI slop with Hazel Wilkinson, Associate Professor of English at the University of Birmingham. Hazel’s specialty is 18th century literature, a time when paper and printing became much cheaper and it became possible to make a living by selling your writing. That also led to a lot of “bad literature”, to the development of copyright laws and to many discussions about the differences between originality and even “genius” and imitative “bad” writing that are surprisingly similar to today’s debates about AI slop and the threat LLMs pose to “good” literature.  

Hazel’s previous research has been on book history and printer’s ornaments, and we begin the discussion by looking at an ornament often used in books that weren’t highly appreciated for their literary quality, showing an ape copying out a text by candlelight. Our discussion ranges from Pope’s The Dunciad, which parodies hack writers, to automatons that wrote out poems in carefully automated handwriting, to “it-narratives” told from the perspective of writing instruments like quills and paper that are outraged at the banal writing the humans use them for.  

• Hazel Wilkinson’s university profile page: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/staff/profiles/english/wilkinson-hazel 

• Compositor is a database of eighteenth century printers’ ornaments. https://compositor.bham.ac.uk/ 

Following Universal Music Groups' settlement and partnership of Udio, Scott and Jhave sit down to discuss the potential future of music in a world with AI.

Look what just dropped down the chimney: Why, it's the first Off Center Christmas Special Holiday Extravaganza Show! Featuring music, human and otherwise, lessons in Norwegian folklore, Christmas beers reviewed, holiday traditions from various cultures, and merriment of all sorts. Featuring Jill Walker Rettberg, Anne Sigrid Refsum, Nick Montfort, Gabriele de Seta, Drew Keller, Hanne-Rikka Roine, Yagmur Vik, Tegan Pyke, Nadja Heiber, Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Søren Pold and the New Originals, Andreas Opsvik, and Ola Roth Johnsen.

In episode four of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta welcomes Nick Seaver, Associate Professor in Anthropology and Director of the Science, Technology & Society program at Tufts University, to catch up on his recent ethnographic research on algorithms, computing and automation.

References

Crary, J. (1999) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture https://archive.org/details/suspensionsofper0000crar

Daston, L. (2011) The Empire of Observation, 1600-1800 

Drott, E. (2021) Fake Streams, Listening Bots, and Click Farms

Elish, M. C., and Boyd, D. (2018) Situating Methods in the Magic of Big Data and AI 

Gell, A. (1992) The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology 

Jobin, A. (2022) Organic Search: The Marketing of a Concept and Its Political Implications 

Nakamura, L. (2002) Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet 

Seaver, N. (2022) Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation 

Seaver, N. (Forthcoming) Attention Fragments https://nickseaver.net/attention-fragments

Scott and Jhave are back talking billions of dollars and discussing whether the new AI economy truly is "too big to fail".

References

Artificial Analysis (2025) Models Leaderboard 

Fortune (2025) Without data centers, US GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025 

GLM-4 (2025) GLM-4.6: Open-Source Bilingual Intermediate Model https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-4

Kimi (2025) Kimi k10 / K2 Thinking: Interleaved Reasoning Model https://www.moonshot.ai/

MiniMax (2025) MiniMax-M2: Video and Language Foundation Models https://www.minimaxir.com/

Sarah Friar (2025) Interview on Unconventional AI Financing and Infrastructure 

District Court, D. Massachusetts (2024) Copyright Infringement Litigation: RIAA v. Suno, Inc. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68897534/recording-industry-association-of-america-inc-v-suno-inc/

In this wide-ranging conversation, host Scott Rettberg sits down with renowned media theorist Roberto Simanowski to map the seismic shifts in digital culture over the last quarter-century. Starting with the early avant-garde experiments in "born-digital" literature and the founding of the journal Dichtung Digital, they trace the evolution of the screen from a space of poetic play to a site of global datafication.

References 

Adorno, Theodor W. (1970) Aesthetic Theory 

Anadol, Refik (2021) Machine Hallucinations https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucinations-nature-dreams/ 

Aarseth, Espen (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature https://archive.org/details/cybertextperspec0000aars 

Habermas, Jürgen (1962) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 

Hales, Katherine (2002) Writing Machines https://archive.org/details/writingmachines0000hayl

Keep, Christopher (1994) A Socrates in the Labyrinth 

Landow, George (1994) Hyper/Text/Theory 

Levin, Golan (2004) The Dumpster 

Menke, Christoph (1998) The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida

Rettberg, Scott; Stratton, William; Gillespie, William; Marquardt, Frank (1998) The Unknown https://unknownhypertext.com/

Simanowski, Roberto (1999) Dichtung Digital https://dichtung-digital.de/ 

Simanowski, Roberto (2002) Interfictions: Vom Schreiben im Netz https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/roberto-simanowski-interfictions-t-9783518122471 

Simanowski, Roberto (2011) Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Contentual Art, Dot-Walks, and Hypertexts 

Simanowski, Roberto (2016) Data Love

Simanowski, Roberto (2016) Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy 

Simanowski, Roberto (2018) The Death Algorithm and Other Digital Dilemmas https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536370/the-death-algorithm-and-other-digital-dilemmas/ 

Utterback, Camille (2002) Deep Wall 

Wilks, James (2016) Poetry Games 

Wolff, Ben; Hall, Zach (2003) Listening Post