All Tomorrow's Cultures

  Stuck in the Turing Matrix: Inauthenticity, Deception and the Social Life of AI Samuel Gerald Collins The Turing test may or may not be a valid test of machine intelligence. But in an age of generative AI, the test describes the positions we humans occupy. Judging whether or not something is human or machine produced is an everyday condition for many of us, one that involves taking a spectrum of positions along what the essay describes as a Turing Matrix combining questions of authenticity with questions of deception. Utilizing data from Reddit postings about AI in broad areas of social life, the essay examines positions taken in a Turing Matrix and describes complex negotiations taken by Reddit posters as they strive to make sense of the AI World in which they live. Even though the Turing Test may not tell us much about the achievement of AGI or other benchmarks, it can tell us a great deal about the limitations of human lif...

    The   Statue   of   Liberty   National Monument consists   of   two islands:   Liberty   Island (which hosts the State   of   Liberty ) and Ellis Island, the site   of   the Ellis Island immigration station and an associated hospital complex.   Liberty   Island became a national monument under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ellis Island was included in the site in the 1960s. During its heyday from the late 19th century until its closure in the 1950s, 12 million people were processed on Ellis island, and it is for many the symbol   of   immigration in the United States. The   Statue   of   Liberty   plays a similar role. As Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem, “The New Colossus," proclaims: Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse   of   your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,/I lift my lam...

  One of the many benchmarks for AI is the “Turing test,” Alan Turing’s adaptation of the “imitation game” where an interrogator must decide which of two respondents is a computer. It is, as many have pointed out, a strangely indirect test, one that depends on the credulity of the human interrogator and the capacity of the machine to deceive (Wooldridge 2020). Will they believe the computer? And will the computer be a good enough liar? As Pantsar (2025) comments, “For the machine to pass the test, it needs to impersonate a human successfully enough to fool the interrogator. But this is puzzling in the wide context of intelligence ascriptions. Why would intelligence be connected to a form of deception?”   On the one hand, measuring AI through its deceptive power has the benefit of avoiding the idiocy of attempting to establish a measure of intelligence, a task deeply imbricated in racial eugenics (Bender and Hanna 2025; Wooldridge 2020). On the other, generative AI applicat...

  As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and soundscapes join film and text in innovative work that seeks to ground worlding in sensorial engagement and haptic experience. Here, the multimodal can support the emancipatory politics of communities where anthropologists work. But what of the politics of multimodal? Is there anything inherently emancipatory in the engagement with diverse platforms? In order to problematize the multimodal, this paper explores another moment in multimodal evocations of alternative futures–Spiritualism in the late 19th century. While “spirit rapping” may have been the first volley in the explosion of Spiritualist practice, the movement soon incorporated writing, drawing, sounds, photographs and multiple objects into its evocations of a “Beautiful Beyond” that represented not only the afterlife, but the utopian...

Matt Durington and I had a wonderful time giving a talk at UBC Okanagan. Thanks to Dr. Fiona McDonald and the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab.    Multimodal interrogations video link