Bullshit Genres: What to Watch for When Studying the New Actant ChatGPT and Its Siblings

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dc.citation.firstpage115en_US
dc.citation.issueNumber3en_US
dc.citation.journalTitleSuomen Antropologien_US
dc.citation.lastpage131en_US
dc.citation.volumeNumber47en_US
dc.contributor.authorGershon, Ilanaen_US
dc.date.accessioned2023-11-07T16:55:28Z
dc.date.available2023-11-07T16:55:28Z
dc.date.issued2023en_US
dc.description.abstractAnother communication technology has been introduced, ChatGPT, drawing the attention of many pundits, occupying valuable space on every op-ed page, and inspiring a Hollywood writers’ strike and endless small talk, all steaming a bit with the intoxicating fumes of moral panic or outsized utopian enthusiasm. Research on artificial intelligence (AI) has existed for decades, entering many people’s daily lives in dribs and drabs. ChatGPT and its siblings, however, have focused so many people’s attention on the potential changes that AI could bring to work lives, entertainment, and social relationships that it seems worthwhile to take a moment now in 2023 to discuss what light linguistic and media anthropologists can shed on what is to come. I say this as one of a handful of media anthropologists also familiar with linguistic anthropology who happened to study people’s use of Facebook (alongside other media) only a few years after its introduction to the US media ecology (Gershon 2010). For more than a decade, I have been thinking about how media ecologies change with each newly introduced medium. Here, I lay out what I believe ethnographers of AI who engage with large language models (LLMs) might want to pay attention to in the next couple of years. My starting point is that it would be helpful to explore how people are responding to ChatGPT in terms of genre, that people’s reactions to ChatGPT is to treat it at its core as though it is a genre machine—that is, a machine intelligence that reproduces and tweaks genres in just the right way for human consumption.en_US
dc.identifier.citationGershon, I. (2023). Bullshit Genres: What to Watch for When Studying the New Actant ChatGPT and Its Siblings. Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 47(3), Article 3. https://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.137824
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.30676/jfas.137824en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1911/115304
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisherFinnish Anthropological Societyen_US
dc.rightsExcept where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license.  Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the terms of the license or beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder. en_US
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/en_US
dc.titleBullshit Genres: What to Watch for When Studying the New Actant ChatGPT and Its Siblingsen_US
dc.typeEssayen_US
dc.type.dcmiTexten_US
dc.type.publicationpublisher versionen_US
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