Postscript: On Models of Control and (Their) Modulation

At the conclusion of this book, an AI begins to take over the writing. Staged as an experiment in asking ChatGPT to write a postscript with a 1,500-word prompt by the author, two columns of text dance across the page, relating across their differences. The texts converge and diverge dramatically, showing how models of control—a nod to Gilles Deleuze’s “societies of control”—might both tighten their determining grip and loosen as they modulate. To conclude with a deep learning experiment embraces what might yet be novel in AI. This is an experiment not simply in what is creative “about” AI but in how creativity arises through ongoing experiments with human-AI relationality. Even in the face of a dark politics of control, artful experiments, techniques, and retracings of AI allow something else to register in computational experience for a time of machine learning.