From Human to Binary and Back: On the Need to Explain and Understand Digital Machines in the Humanities

Abstract

This article aims to bring attention to some usually overlooked aspects of the relationship between humans and complex digital technologies. Before engaging with artificial intelligence (AI), it is indeed pivotal to address some key questions about it. Specifically, I will try to focus on our ability to understand how AI technologies work and determine creative and critical uses we can make of them. To do so, I will first discuss problems associated with using the current definitions of AI and suggest that we should make a creative effort to re-translate these terms in order to find better-suited expressions. I will call attention to the need for a different kind of translation, which negotiates between what machines do and what we can understand about them, because one of the biggest challenges of machine learning is to make the in­ter­nal processes explainable and understandable for us humans. I will close with elab­o­ra­tions on some creative forms of interaction with language models and image models which support artists, writers and creators (who do not want to see their work stolen by AI crawlers and used to train datasets), with the overall goal of building an ethical, crit­ical and sustainable relationship between humans and digital machines.