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BEN POTTER 

Doctoral Researcher, Media, Arts and Humanities
        
Synthetic Mediations: Critically Conceptualising the Impact of LLMs on Communication
        
The rise of Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots promises to democratise access to the production of media but also risks flooding the internet with meaningless content, a change which necessitates careful conceptualisation. This paper attempts to establish a theoretical framework to better understand neural chatbots from a critical media perspective. I utilise Critical Theory and phenomenological approaches to media, foregrounding a conceptual perspective on mediation. While mediation is a good starting point, the unique affordances of neural chat interfaces—acting as communication partners, retrieving complex information, and producing synthetic media—require a thicker conceptual frame. Towards this end, I propose the framework of ‘synthetic mediation’, which deepens our understanding of this communication phenomenon and engages media scholars and critical theorists.
        
Dr. ANDRES SHAOI, CEU Universidad San Pablo, Spain.
Visiting Fellow in Media, Journalism and Cultural Studies
        

Unpacking Algorithmic Literacy: Is Technical Knowledge about AI a Prerequisite for Critical Thinking?
        
Algorithmic literacy is an emerging and heterogeneous field that is already informing educational, policy-making, and communication processes across various levels and contexts. Scholarly works that systematize existing knowledge on this concept have highlighted its multidimensional nature. It is understood to encompass several aspects, including awareness and knowledge, creation and design skills, critical evaluation, and coping strategies. However, some of these aspects, particularly technical knowledge and skills, appear to be the object of greater scholarly attention, conceptual consensus and methodological development compared to other aspects, such as critical thinking and coping strategies, where the field remains less developed and more fragmented.
       

One reason for this trend, as explicitly assumed in some publications, is that having “basic” knowledge and technical skills related to AI is a prerequisite for developing critical thinking. In contrast, we argue that critical evaluation, defined as the capacity to identify values embedded in technology design, deployment, and use, is primarily justifiable as a cross-cutting and continuous aspect of the literacy process, comprising its own specific knowledge, attitudes, and skills.
       

This argument will be presented by systematizing available knowledge at two levels — a theoretical perspective and a case study. For the theoretical level, we will map the key arguments regarding the non-neutrality of technology from the standpoint of critical theories. The case study will focus on the experience of the algorithmic autobiography workshops, illustrating how critical thinking about algorithms can be developed before and in parallel with the acquisition of AI skills typically considered “basic” from a technical perspective.
        
Dr. Tanya Kant, 
Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, MAH
        
‘I Am Not a Robot’: Algorithmic Personalisation, LLMs and AI Impersonation
        
This paper critically interrogates the algorithmic personalisation of web users' experiences in a digital milieu increasingly populated by so-called 'AI' actors, agents and assemblages. I consider what appears to be a tension in communicative flows of capitalism between the exchange value of 'authentic' human attention and the increasing 'infoglut' (Andrejevic, 2013) produced by generative AI systems. This paper takes a critical political economy approach to emerging forms of generative AI - focusing on LLMs - to critically situate their place in what can be considered a wider history of computational impersonation. I argue that the commercial drive to personalise web content continues to present a critical site of investigation for understanding the socio-cultural implications of AI produced-content and the attention economy.
        
        
Next Seminar for your diary:
         
Wednesday, 4th December 2024
 4.30pm-6.30pm, in room A108.

Posted on behalf of: School of Media, Arts and Humanities
Last updated: Tuesday, 29 October 2024