Is it sensical to ascribe psychological predicates to AI systems like chatbots based on large language models (LLMs)? People have intuitively started ascribing emotions or consciousness to social AI ('affective artificial agents'), with consequences that range from love to suicide. The philosophical question of whether such ascriptions are warranted is thus very relevant. This paper advances the argument that LLMs instantiate language users in Ludwig Wittgenstein's sense but that ascribing psychological predicates to these systems remains a functionalist temptation. Social AIs are not full-blown language users, but rather more like Italo Calvino's literature machines. The ideas of LLMs as Wittgensteinian language users and Calvino's literature-producing writing machine are combined. This sheds light on the misguided functionalist temptation inherent in moving from equating the two to the ascription of psychological predicates to social AI. Finally, the framework of mortal computation is used to show that social AIs lack the basic autopoiesis needed for narrative fa\c{c}ons de parler and their role in the sensemaking of human (inter)action. Such psychological predicate ascriptions could make sense: the transition 'from quantity to quality' can take place, but its route lies somewhere between life and death, not between affective artifacts and emotion approximation by literature machines.

Mexican photographer and architect Eetov explores an alternate architectural reality in New York, interweaving photographs of iconic structures with AI interventions. Titled'AI Buildings' the series explores the application of artificial intelligence design tool DALL·E 2 through hybridization with images of streetscapes and architecture across the city. Through resulting compositions of familiar urban icons reimagined in new expressions, the project investigates how bustling metropolises like New York could have been adopted if, for one reason or another, they had not been designed as we know them today. 'AI buildings' ponders the constant human fascination for the speculation of the imagined and its encompassing fantasy. As a result, the series reveals photographs of reality becoming intervened through propositions whose main premise is the variations of specific elements of the image -- in this case, the building itself.

Literary critics often attempt to uncover meaning in a single work of literature through careful reading and analysis. Applying natural language processing methods to aid in such literary analyses remains a challenge in digital humanities. While most previous work focuses on "distant reading" by algorithmically discovering high-level patterns from large collections of literary works, here we sharpen the focus of our methods to a single literary theory about Italo Calvino's postmodern novel Invisible Cities, which consists of 55 short descriptions of imaginary cities. Calvino has provided a classification of these cities into eleven thematic groups, but literary scholars disagree as to how trustworthy his categorization is. Due to the unique structure of this novel, we can computationally weigh in on this debate: we leverage pretrained contextualized representations to embed each city's description and use unsupervised methods to cluster these embeddings. Additionally, we compare results of our computational approach to similarity judgments generated by human readers. Our work is a first step towards incorporating natural language processing into literary criticism.

This is the full version of the paper Scott Rettberg presented for me at ISEA 2004 in Helsinki, on August 20, 2004. I slightly abbreviated the text he read so it would fit in the alloted time. The text that I sumitted to ISEA was abbreviated further so as to not exceed the (believe it or not) 13250 character limit. As I started researching this topic, I gave a preliminary talk at the History of Material Texts workshop; that text is online. If you'd like to correspond about the topic and correct or inform me about the use of print-based interfaces, please contact me: nickm at this domain.