Designing Neural Media

I'm not sure I fully understand or agree with this, but it's a strong attempt to think ahead about how the use of generative ai and machine learning tools might affect individuals, community, and society. And I like that it goes deep to a fundamental: neural nets.

Most of us know neural nets through the outputs they produce: convincing simulations of linguistic intelligence or synthetic imagery and music. But deep neural nets have a formal underlying property from which their abilities manifest: high-dimensionality. However, AI systems are implemented, they will always rely on and in some way, express, their high-dimensional structure. Just as broadcast media aggregated mass attention and network media reconfigured society according to its native structures, so too will neural media’s structures appear in future social and political forms. By understanding high-dimensionality, we can develop better intuitions about the formal nature of neural nets that will help us think more clearly when we engage with AI.