I had been wanting for some time to write an article channeling some of my grumpiness about AI, and so when Information and Learning Sciences announced a special issue on “Critical Studies Perspectives on AI’s Impact in Education,” it seemed like a good chance to actually act on that. I was especially interested in two of the example research questions from the CFP:

What research and scholarly paradigms, methods and theories are well-suited to understanding the proliferation of AI in education contexts?

Anyone following this blog for a while—even from a distance—will have noticed how frequently I reference Jacques Ellul, and anyone paying attention to what I’m reading these days will note that there’s been an uptick in the Mormon Studies books I’m reading recently. Without giving too much away, the idea for a book I mentioned a month ago brings these two ideas together. As evidenced by my recent presentation at the International Jacques Ellul Society, I think that Ellul’s writing is helpful for understanding Mormonism’s relationship with technology and media, and I expect to be writing more about this in the years to come.

Later this week, I’ll be presenting for the first time at the International Jacques Ellul Society. My paper is called Image and Word in Mormonism’s Foundational Media Events, and I’ll be using Ellul’s image and word framework in The Humiliation of the Word as an explanatory framework for how the founding events of Mormonism can be understood by scholars and believers as either the sure-and-certain image or the ambiguous and fleeting word. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Latter-day Saints and their leaders tend to prefer the image over the word, and I think Ellul’s writing helps understand why this is (beyond the obvious reasons)

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Jacques Ellul’s image/word dichotomy as more broadly applicable than to media—as applicable to the whole technical phenomenon that he criticizes. That is, by virtue of its seeming objectivity, the technical phenomenon enjoys trust that is not warranted when one digs into the details and sees the fuzziness and subjectivities and artifice that prop the whole thing up. Doctorow’s critique here seems firmly in that vein.

I don’t mind being a broken record when pointing out Ellulian vibes. Check this paragraph out:

These are unfortunate examples of how AI can lead to mistreatment of people because of technical flaws as well as misplaced human faith in the technology’s supposed objectivity. These cases involve different tools, but the underlying issue is the same. AI systems produce probabilities, and people treat them as certainties.

I wish I knew enough about photography to really appreciate the details here, but I’m bookmarking it anyway because it feels like a contemporary, unintentional echo of observations Ellul makes in The Humiliation of the Word.

Big Ellulian “image vs. word” vibes here.

Another story that speaks to the power of Ellul’s “image vs. word” distinction. It must be trustworthy because it comes from a machine…

Easy to dunk on Grokipedia, but this article gets at some ideas that I think are particularly important. If I had more time for blogging this semester, I’d write something up on Ellul’s image vs. word dichotomy and how it aligns with Koebler’s thoughts here.