Off Center

This episode Scott and Jhave talk about some of the ways in which AI is finding itself involved in research. They talk about some of the AI models that have been developed with research in mind as well as some of their own experiments with these models.

References:

Brain2Qwerty https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/brain-to-text-decoding-a-non-invasive-approach-via-typing/

Claude https://claude.ai/ Accessed March 11, 2025.

Deep research. https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ Accessed March 11, 2025.

Eliot, George. 1879. “Impressions of Theophrastus Such” William Blackwood and Sons.

Perplexity deep research https://www.perplexity.ai/?model_id=deep_research Accessed March 11, 2025.

Rettberg, Scott. 2020. “Republicans In Love” https://eloconference2023exhibitions.wordpress.com/exhibition2_resistance/republicans-in-love/

On this episode Scott joins David Bithell overseas, at Southern Oregon University's Digital Media Center. They talk about digital performance, collaborative online music and digital puppetry.

References:

Bithell, David. Followers. 2017. http://www.davidbithell.com/followers.html

Bithell, David. Matters Dark and Luminous. 2023-Present. http://www.davidbithell.com/mattersdarkandluminous.htmlBithell, David. Subterranean. 2020. http://www.davidbithell.com/subterranean.html

Bithell, David. Windward. 2018. http://www.davidbithell.com/windward.html

In this week's AI Update, Scott and Jhave discuss some of the ways in which fascism reproduces itself, how AI could be used as a tool to facilitate it, and how those leading AI development have found themselves in positions of political power.

References:

Ahmed, S. (2024). Social Media News Use Amplifies the Illusory Truth Effects of Viral Deepfakes: A Cross-National Study of Eight Countries. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08838151.2024.2410783

Anna's Archive & Library Genesis. https://annas-archive.org/ , https://libgen.is/

Bain, N., & Bartolo, D. (2025). Emergence of collective oscillations in massive human crowds.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/388724182_Emergence_of_collective_oscillations_in_massive_human_crowds

Bletchley Declaration. (2023). Countries attending the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-safety-summit-2023-the-bletchley-declaration

Canetti, E. (1960). Crowds and Power https://archive.org/details/crowdspower0000cane

Furie, M. (2005). Pepe the Frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepe_the_Frog

Harrison, H. (1957). The Stainless Steel Rat. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/70034

Knausgaard, K. O. (2011). My Struggle: Book 6 https://archipelagobooks.org/book/my-struggle-book-six/

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.: https://archive.org/details/decolonisingmind0000ngug

Sutskever, I. (2023). Ilya: the AI scientist shaping the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqn1HhFJ6c

Swartz, A. (2008). Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt

Watkins, G. (2025). AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism. https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

In this episode, Scott travels to Australia to talk with Tama Leaver at the Center of Excellence for the Digital Child. They discuss Tama's involvement with the Center, his research regarding generative AI, the ways in which children interact with AI and how they can be affected by them, as well as a recent ban to social media for all children under 16 in Australia.

References

Haidt, Jonathan. The anxious generation: how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. 2024. New York, Penguin Press.

Leaver, Tama, and Suzanne Srdarov. 2025. "Generative AI and Children's Digital Futures: New Research Challenges." Journal of Children and Media. 19 (1): 65-70. doi:10.1080/17482798.2024.2438679.

Ritchie, Hannah. Australia approves social media ban on under-16s. BBC News, Sydney. November 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89vjj0lxx9o

Jhave and Scott talk about simulated worlds or environments created with AI, considering what are the boundaries for artifical life.

References

ByteDance. (2025). Protenix: Toward High-Accuracy Open-Source Biomolecular Structure Prediction. https://github.com/bytedance/Protenix

Conway, J. H. (1970). The Game of Life. Scientific American, 223(4) https://conwaylife.com/

Genesis Consortium. (2024). Genesis: A generative universal physics engine for robotics and beyond.

Google Quantum AI. (2024, December 9). Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip. https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/

Kumar, A., Lu, C., Kirsch, L., Tang, Y., Stanley, K. O., Isola, P., & Ha, D. (2024). Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17799

Nvidia. (2025)6). NVIDIA Launches Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform to Accelerate Physical AI Development. https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-launches-cosmos-world-foundation-model-platform-to-accelerate-physical-ai-development

Reynolds, C. W. (1987). Flocks, herds and schools: A distributed behavioral model. https://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/

Sims, K. (1994). Evolving Virtual Creatures. https://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.htmlThis work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

In this episode we are joined by co-authors Lillian-Yvonne Bertram and Nick Montfort to talk about their new publication Output: An Anthology of Computer Generated Text, 1953-2023. We learn about their path into digital poetry and the process of putting together this anthology.

References

Bertram, Lillian-Yvonne. (2019). Travesty generator. https://www.nationalbook.org/books/travesty-generator/

Bertram, Lillian-Yvonne, & Montfort, Nick (Eds.). (2024). Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/5867/OutputAn-Anthology-of-Computer-Generated-Text-1953

Gysin, Brion, & Sommerville, Ian. (1960). Permutation Poems.https://davidpocknee.ricercata.org/gysin/

Knowles, Alison, & Tenney, James. (1967). The House of Dust.https://theverseverse.com/poems/the-house-of-dust

Lutz, Theo. (1959). Stochastic Texts https://www.stuttgarter-schule.de/lutz_schule_en.htm

Montfort, Nick. (2017). The Truelist. https://counterpathpress.org/the-truelist-nick-montfort

Montfort, Nick, & Wardrip-Fruin, Noah (Eds.). (2003). The New Media Readerhttps://www.newmediareader.com/

Nish-Lapidus, Matt. (2020). Work, Life, Balance. https://www.aleator.press/shop/p/work-life-balance

Richardson, Leonard. (2013). Alice’s Adventures in the Whale. Stiles, Sasha. (2021). Technelegy. https://www.sashastiles.com/technelegyhardcover

Strachey, Christopher. (1953). Love Letters https://alpha60.de/art/love_letters/manchester_gallery/

Yngve, Victor H. (1961). Random Sentences https://literaryai.library.columbia.edu/litai/i36/This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

In this AI Update Jhave and Scott discuss O3, the new AI model announced by OpenAI, which excels in high-complexity tasks, demonstrating state-of-the-art capabilities in science, structured reasoning, and problem-solving.

References

Brown, N., & Sandholm, T. (2018). Superhuman AI for heads-up no-limit poker: Libratus beats top professionals. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aao1733

Chollet, F. (2019). On the measure of intelligence.https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547

DeepSeek-AI et al. (2024). DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19437

DeepSeek-AI et al. (2025). DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948

Epoch AI. (2024). FrontierMath: A Benchmark for Evaluating Advanced Mathematical Reasoning. https://epoch.ai/frontiermath

Meta Fundamental AI Research Diplomacy Team (FAIR) et al. (2022). Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade9097

Rein, D., et al. (2023). GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.12022

Shao, Z., et al. (2024). DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03300

Snell, C., Lee, J., Xu, K., & Kumar, A. (2024). Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03314

Sutton, R. (2019). The Bitter Lesson. Incomplete Ideas. http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

Xin, H., et al. (2024). DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5: Harnessing Proof Assistant Feedback for Reinforcement Learning and Monte-Carlo Tree Search https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08152

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

In this episode, Alinta Krauth, new media artist, is joining Scott Rettberg for a discussion about her art and interspecies communication.

References

Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI). https://aci-sigchi.org/

Bertram, L. Y., & Montfort, N. (Eds.). (2024). Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953–2023. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262549813/output/

Kleinberger, R., Hirskyj-Douglas, I., Cunha, J., & Meisner, E. (2023). "Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together: Design and Evaluation of an Agency-Based Video-Calling System for Domesticated Parrots." Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581166

Krauth, A. (2020). The Bat Translator (also known as The Clouds Are Falling) https://www.alintakrauth.com/#!portfolio

Krauth, A. Interspecies Games https://www.enrichmentart.com/#!portfolio

Krauth, A. (2023). When the Songbird Speaks. https://thedigitalreview.com/issue04/alintakrauth/index.html 

Leonardo/ISAST. https://leonardo.info/

McKay, L. J. (2020). The Animals in That Country. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52527550-the-animals-in-that-country

MeowTalk AI. https://www.meowtalk.app/

Sharma, P., et al. (2024). "Contextualizing Sperm Whale Codas." Nature Communications. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8

Slobodchikoff, C. N. (2012). Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263199506_Chasing_Doctor_Dolittle_Learning_the_Language_of_Animals 

Whitman, W. (1855). Leaves of Grass https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1322

Woollahra Digital Literary Award. https://www.woollahra.nsw.gov.au/library/whats-on/digital-literary-awardThis work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

Jhave and Scott discuss recent developments in AI and forecast new developments in AI storytelling, reasoning, efficiency, organoids, and medicine coming in 2025.

References

Amodei, D., & Hernandez, D. (2018). AI and Compute. https://openai.com/index/ai-and-compute/

Jumper, J., et al. (2021). Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03819-2

Snell, C., et al. (2024). Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.03314

Wang, Z., Li, J., Lin, H., Yoon, J., & Bansal, M. (2024). DreamRunner: Fine-Grained Compositional Story-to-Video Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Motion Adaptation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.16657

Watson, J. L., et al. (2023). De novo design of protein structure and function with RFdiffusion. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06415-8

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

In this AI update, hosts Scott Rettberg and David Jhave Johnston dive deep into the connection between AI and violence. Tune in for the latest AI updates, and the last episode of the year. We will continue the season in the new year.

References

Calvo, Serena, et al. 2024. Does suicide contagion (Werther Effect) take place in response to social media? A systematic review. Spanish journal of psychiatry and mental health.

HBO Entertainment. 2011. Game of Thrones. HBO.

Lystad, Reidar P., Brown, Benjamin T. 2018. “Death is certain, the time is not”: mortality and survival in Game of Thrones. Inj. Epidemiol, (5)44. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40621-018-0174-7

Ree, Benjamin, [director]. 2024. “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin.” Netflix. 1 hr., and 24 min.

Ritchie, Hannah. 2024. “Australia approves social media ban on under-16s.” BBC News. Effective November 29, 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89vjj0lxx9o

The New York Times. 2024. “Can A.I. be blamed for a teen's suicide?” The New York Times. Effective, October 23, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/technology/characterai-lawsuit-teensuicide.html

Weizenbaum, Joseph. 1967. ELIZA.

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.