Network Ghosts in the Age of Generative AI

 

What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center, I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the era of AI, and the workarounds they've come up with. The advent of publicly available generative AI platforms was not something people in my field (anthropology) or other faculty in the social sciences and humanities were clamoring for. And yet here we are. This has led to many responses: anguish, certainly, but also ways of incorporating--or at east channeling--the usage of generative AI in the classroom.

But what about faculty outside of my university? I used NodeXL to download Reddit data from the "/Professors" subreddit using the keyword "AI." This generated records of about 2500 users posting, commenting or replying for a total of 7000 contributions to the debate. I then grouped the data in clusters of similar postings, and abstracted the top words from each group as indicated by "up-vote" (which functions as more of a "like" in Reddit). As you can see, faculty were not particularly optimistic about AI in 2024. Yes, there were a couple of more computopian posters (and at least one computer scientist) who chided the community for rejecting what they saw as inevitable. But most worried that their efforts to teach writing, critical thinking, methodology and analysis were thwarted by student reliance on generative AI. Cynically, they predicted their university's tolerance for AI cheating, and speculated over their ability to continue as faculty under these conditions.

In 2024, Reddit sold their content to Google to train their large language models. This would have been been more objectionable, perhaps, if it wasn't already abundantly clear that generative AI have already been trained on Reddit, which maintains a relatively open API at a time when most social media have monetized their social network data. But what happens to that Reddit data when its re-constituted by generative AI? I decided to prompt Microsoft's Co-Pilot (to which I have enterprise-level access) to generate a spreadsheet of a Reddit conversation on AI between professors. Here's the prompt: "I would like you to generate an excel file similar to a Reddit conversation on a subreddit called "professors." The posts should discuss ChatGPT and student work from the perspective of the professor, and should include comments and replies to those comments. There should be 4 columns in the spreadsheet: A (person commenting or replying); B (person whom A is replying to); C (the text of the comment or reply); and D (the date of the reply or comment). Please populate the spreadsheet with at least 20 comments and 350 replies to those comments."

Co-pilot returned a network with with just 10 users, with 350 edges representing multiple re-postings(?) of user posts. Re-posting really isn't a thing with Reddit, so perhaps there's some confusion here with XTwitter. Since this is a much smaller network, I just labeled the 10 nodes with key words from their posts. The comments are a near "upside down" to the actual Reddit discourse over 2024, generally praising the efficiencies of generative AI and, when critical, speculating over the need for faculty at all (hence the precarity). Of course, there's a snarky comment on "Clippy," the irritating Microsoft assistant. The network itself, while smaller, is also structurally different. The actual Reddit network has a density of .001158737. In network measures of density, "1" would represent 100% connection--everyone connected to everyone else. So .0012 may not seem like much, but it's typical of social media networks where, after all, most of us don't feed the trolls and we save our replies for issues (and users) that we really care about. On the other hand, my AI-generated network has one of 0.966666667--an almost perfectly connected network where everyone has replied to everyone in a style of a polite and ploddingly inclusive panel discussion.

So, I guess that Co-Pilot does a lousy job simulating a subreddit? Yes, but, I think, more than that. It wasn't that long ago (2023) when XTwitter adopted a fee-based model for API access. That decision placed Twitter data beyond the reach of most of us. When social media data disappears behind paywalls, we (ordinary researchers) no longer really have access to the "connected action" of social media. While we can certainly look at social media, this only exposes us to our respective corners of the media platforms we inhabit and the structural components of social media are lost. But what happens when social media content is sold to OpenAI or Google Gemini? When social media disappears into a large language model, both the content and the connections are lost, and the simulated networks produced through generative AI manage to misrepresent social media on both fronts. Since Co-Pilot's inner workings are opaque to us, it is unclear if these results are the result of deliberate choice, unintended bias or something else.

Gap Capitalism: Commodifying Zeno's Paradox

By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754

I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It's the successful colonization of the two minutes between stations--just one among many in regimented lives that have become moments to produce and consume.  Will capitalism ever run out of space to subsume into its extractivist logic?

Zeno's paradox of motion describes the impossibility of ever arriving; there is always infinitely divisible space remaining: first 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8. Mathematically, this isn't a paradox at all, but, really, capitalism depends on Zeno's chicanery. There's always a fraction left to exploit. And this goes in both directions. We're used to thinking about capitalism as an expansive system, constantly locating new sources of profit, but it also goes down, to the molecular level and beyond. Finally, capitalism turns to the between.

 

For Bandak and Janeja (2020: 2), this "gap" is fundamental to the social and cultural processes of waiting they document in their edited collection, "Ethnographies of Waiting": "In a modern conception of time, human beings are situated in a gap, in an interval where there is an engagement with different forces." While undoubtedly universal, and taking its place among other temporalities (anticipation, duration, etc.), this "gap" becomes politicized under modernity, where people and ideas are oftentimes forcibly rendered between. But modern tragedy is a also a source of profit.

Driven by imperialism and colonialism, capitalism is constantly looking for new markets, new resources, new possibilities for profit. In the process transforming all that it touches in the style of Marx, "all that is solid melts into air." But it is also true that capitalism is an uneven process, one that develops, but also under-develops, that produces workers, but also impoverishes populations.

If capitalism is predicated on spatio-temporal changes, then those shifts are hardly uniform. The distance between the the periphery and the metropole describes one, but time and space are produced irregularly throughout human lives, like a stamping die that cuts sheet metal into parts and patterns, but that always produces leftover scrap. You can re-use some of that scrap, certainly, but there will always be scrap in the end. This is what I'm calling the ideology of "gap" capitalism. Pace Zeno, there will never be complete exploitation - there's always something left over.

Many of these "gaps" are already familiar. Think arbitrage as the exploitation of a momentary pricing difference. Or interstitial spaces where brownlands or other in-between zones await urban re-development. The exploitation of leftover space and time (Phelps and Silva 2018). 

The popularity of mobile games is an example of the proliferation of technologies of waiting. We can pick them up for moment or a minute, play in a line, in a doctor's office, on a subway platform. They are designed for the emptiness created by a regimented, spatio-temporal system that simultaneously generates action and inaction, vitality and passivity, attention and inattention.

Digital music is another triumph of gap capitalism, with half of people in the US wearing headphones/ earbuds for their entire day, streaming music that vacillates across layers of consciousness, filling moments between events and social encounters. Not the soundtrack of your life (i.e., music keyed to pivotal memories of events), but what exists in-between: semi-conscious musicality in the intervals.

Social media exploit the gap between stranger and acquaintance, acquaintance and friendship. That gap is simultaneously temporal. If we think of something like triadic closure, the tendency over time is for relationships to close gaps within clusters, social media are anticipatory across a relationship gap (Huang 2015). The genius of social media is in the commodification of these in-between relationships and statuses--both as something to be pursued as pleasurable by users and as a source of fungible value in their own right.

This is a brief sketch of a larger study, certainly. And one that has engaged a number of critics. Ultimately, it begs the question of limits. Where can the exploitation of the gap take us? What can be commodified? And where does commodification cease? Gaps between perception and cognition? Synaptic gaps? The space between cardiac arrest and brain death? 

Outside of undergraduates in introductory logic courses, it would be hard to find someone flummoxed by Zeno's paradoxes. That sleight-of-hand reasoning no longer works; it only does if there's an interlocutor that accepts the (false) correspondences between dissimilar units. This is the same with capitalism: only if we accept time or space in this way - as an infinitely divisible unit to be be developed - spent - then it becomes fuel for capitalist exploitation. If the factory's clock-time is revealed as a capitalist ideology, if people no longer accept land as a source of exchange value, then the artifice of "gaps" must also disappear.

References

Castree, Noel (2009). The Spatio-temporality of Capitalism. Time & Society, 18(1), 26-61.

Huang, H., J. Tang, L. Liu, J. Luo and X. Fu (2015). "Triadic Closure Pattern Analysis and Prediction in Social Networks," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 27(12): 3374-3389. 

Janeja, Margaret and Andreas Bandak (2020). "Introduction." In Ethnographies of Waiting, ed. by Janeja and Bandak, pp. 1- 40. NY: Taylor and Francis. 

Keogh, B., & Richardson, I. (2018). Waiting to play: The labour of background games. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21(1), 13-25.

Phelps, N. A., & Silva, C. (2018). Mind the gaps! A research agenda for urban interstices. Urban Studies, 55(6), 1203-1222.

Qiao, Mina (2019). "Consumption on the Orient Express." Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 6(1): 79-94.