Tag: digital plastic
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Digital Plastic as a framework for Critical AI Literacy
The concept of “digital plastic” in generative AI highlights its characteristics: cheap, malleable, ubiquitous, and persistent. This framework promotes critical AI literacy through classroom strategies, encouraging purposeful use, awareness of implications, and fostering critical judgement in synthetic media creation.
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Digital Plastic: Miraculous substance or graceless slop?
Is GenAI a magical, miraculous substance that “democratises creativity”? Or is it just graceless slop? Developing Critical AI Literacy means interrogating the design of AI systems.
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The Semiotics of Synthetic Media: Production and Meaning in Digital Plastic
Lately I’ve been digging in to the metaphor of Generative AI content as “digital plastic”. I first wrote about it back in 2023 in this article, where I defined the media as a “mass produced, synthetic form of data that like its physical counterpart doesn’t degrade much over time” and likened it to the way…
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Digital Plastic: Understanding AI-Generated Synthetic Media
What is Digital Plastic? Last year, I wrote an article introducing the concept of digital plastic, coining the term to describe AI-generated synthetic media, which, like its real-world counterpart, can be both helpful and harmful. Lately, I’ve been revisiting the term amidst ongoing discussions around quickly developing technologies like video generation. In this post, I’m…
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Digital plastic: Generative AI and the digital ecosystem
I’ve got a love hate relationship with the metaphors we use to talk about Artificial Intelligence, but at the risk of seeming hypocritical I’m going to make one anyway. I’m also going to mangle several fields of science, geology, and archaeology in the process, but hey, it’s all in the pursuit of The Metaphor. I…