Reflections on Imagination of Future and AI

This chapter contributes to debates on human–Artificial Intelligence (AI) relations in International Politics (IP) by examining the role of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLM) in knowledge formation. The key question the chapter asks concerns what kind of knowledges and futural imaginations NLP and LLMs enable. The question recognizes the mutually constitutive role of advanced technical systems and their impact on ways in which humans imagine their political futures. Drawing from speculative and materialist literatures in IP, the authors uploaded five original reflective pieces to the system and asked it to generate a dialogue therefrom. Since ChatGPT’s technical limitations prohibited a naturally flowing text, they edited its outputs for narrative and clarity, thereby further enmeshing their own agencies and ideas with those provided by ChatGPT’s synthesis. The authors conclude that ChatGPT has muted their original voices to generate a ‘flat’ version of their original reflections, which broadly describes ways in which it erases nuance to reach capacities for average recognition of patterns. It has also given them an insight into how forms of producing knowledge will characterize human interactions with such systems. The chapter argues that knowledge production will increasingly depend on processes of ‘tweaking’, ‘adjusting’, and ‘prompting’ systems such as ChatGPT to generate outputs. This is both exciting and boring, both productive and toxic. However, it emphasizes ways in which algorithmic computation is becoming a condition for interacting online and in real life, thereby framing, enabling, and limiting particular forms of futural imaginations.