Works In Progress - Sarah Pourciau - Associate Professor of German Studies

Androids, Dreaming: The Problem of Latent Space

When the category of imagination shows up in public discourse today it almost always marks a loss. Sometimes we are told that we have ceased to prioritize this capacity as we should, with unfortunate results for our social wellbeing. (“Imagination bridges the subjective and objective,” writes David Brooks for The New York Times, “yet how much do schools prioritize the cultivation of this essential ability?”) More often, and more interestingly, the message is that we have no actual choice in the matter: this once-celebrated faculty for making art and bridging gaps—between worlds and minds, actual and possible, past and the future, real and ideal—can no longer operate right under current economic and technological conditions. The discourse of disappearance comes to a head in the rhetoric surrounding large language models, whose “black-boxed” and thus literally unimaginable computational mechanisms allow them to generate—or to “hallucinate”—new representations in our stead. The medium in which they do so goes by the pseudo-technical name of “latent space.” The talk will analyze and critique our contemporary loss stories against the backdrop of these recent computational developments, arguing that we need to rethink rather than reject the historical nexus of the computable and the creative if we want to make sense of our machines making sense.