TALE: “How AI Curate”

Oliver Ding

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TALE500

12 min readMar 2, 2023

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The Power and Politics of Smart Curation

The above picture represents a Possible Theme called “How AI Curate”.

Name: How AI Curate
Clue: The Power and Politics of Smart Curation
Type: knowledge theme
Contributors: Jenny Davis
Reference: Curativity Theory, How Artifacts Afford, Critical Sociology

The theme of “How AI Curate” was inspired by a thread about ChatGPT on Twitter. On March 1, 2023, Jenny Davis published the following 11 tweets about ChatGPT.

1/ ChatGPT has evoked much concern over authorship & intellectual property; academic integrity; veracity; and tone & tenor. Not enough attention is paid, however, to ChatGPT’s inherent conservativism.
2/ I don’t mean “conservativism” in the political sense, but in the conservation of an existing social order, knowledge system, and the status quo reflected therein.
3/ ChatGPT and other generative AI produce outputs from existing data. Those data come from people in a world that already exists, with knowledge and assumptions already in play.
4/ Even if the AI advances to a point of technical perfection — accurate, sophisticated, civil, appropriate attribution etc. — that which is produced will still, always, be a product of the past, re-entrenching to shape the future.
5/ “Novel” outputs, pristine as they may be, become part of the data corpus, bits to be fed into subsequent AI generated creations.
6/ But they are never really novel. They are, always, a reconstituted past.
7/ This means knowledge, narrative, and creative products develop through a process of (re)cycle, bringing what was and what is into the worlds that will be.
8/ These processes of conservativism and recycle aren’t intrinsically bad — there’s no value in change for change’s sake.
9/ But conservatism and recycle are a problem if and when that which is conserved and recycled are already problematic.
10/ Considering the implications of generative AI thus demands we consider what knowledges, narratives, and worlds those systems will, by their technical operations, recreate.
11/ Recognizing an inherent conservativism of these systems is necessary to do that work of assessment and imagining [End]

Jenny Davis is a sociologist at the Australian National University and author of How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things (MIT Press 2020).

Ten days ago, I published the “Product as Thing” framework from the perspective of Product-based Business Development.

Inspired by Ecological Psychology and other theoretical resources, the Ecological Practice approach offers a systematic multip-level framework to connect the Potential, Actual, and Thematic aspects of social practices.

Potential: possible opportunities
Actual: real acts and actions
Thematic: themes behind curated actions

In order to apply the Ecological Practice approach to the field of Product Development, I developed a possible theme called “Product as Thing” and developed a basic model to visualize my thoughts about the theme.

The basic unit of the Ecological Practice approach is the “Person — Thing” interaction and relationship.

Potential: the potential possible opportunities that a person could act with a particular thing.
Actual: what does a person actually act with the thing? Act 1 and Act 2 refer to two types of acts.
Focus: it refers to the thing the person is acting with.

From different perspectives, we can find many ways to discuss the “Person — Thing” interaction and relationships. In order to simplify the discussion, I use one thematic space to discuss one aspect of the thing.

I select the following five aspects to connect the Ecological Practice approach and the “Person — Thing” interaction and relationship. If you use other theoretical approaches, you can use the above basic model to build your own thematic spaces.

The Natural aspect of Thing: Affordance > Object
The Social aspect of Thing: Supportance > Artifact
The Commercial aspect of Thing: Attachance > Product
The Digital aspect of Thing: Curativity > Platform
The Cultural aspect of Thing: Genidentity > Brand

The above diagram also shows ten types of actions:

Found
Use
Make
Share
Sell
Buy
Host
Join
Call
Tell

The “Product as Thing” framework doesn’t consider Roles, Environments, Rules, Laws, etc because these topics are not the primary focus of the Ecological Practice approach.

However, Product-based Business Development is a social practice. We need to consider these issues. For me, the solution is to directly adopt sociologists’ theories as references.

Yesterday, I re-read Jenny Davis’s book How Artifacts Afford.

Jenny Davis reuses the word “Affordance” to discuss the “artifacts—actors” relationship from the perspective of sociology, especially the critical school. According to Jenny, there are six patterns within the “artifacts — actors” relationship (p.65).

Expanding on previous work, I suggest a framework in which technological objects do not just afford or not afford but request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow.
Requests and demands are bids placed by technological objects, on user-subjects.
Encourage, discourage, and refuse are the ways technologies respond to bids user-subjects place upon them.

Jenny names this framework Mechanisms of Affordances. She also develops a framework called Conditions of Affordance which considers three broad factors: perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy (p.89).

To be honest, I am a fundamentalist Gibsonian approach to perception, action, and social mind. I don’t support many repurposing works that only use the word “Affordance” without accepting Gibson’s original Affordance Theory.

However, I learn many new ideas from Jenny’s book. While my focus is the “environment — person” relationship, her focus is the “artifacts—actors” relationship. The Gibsonian approach sees everything outside of the body as the environment. Moreover, there is no clear boundary between the body and the environment. Sometimes, your body is your environment.

How can we curate the Gibsonian approach with the critical sociological approach together? I think this is a hard task. A good way is to consider the “environment — person” relationship and the “artifacts — actors” relationship as two units of analysis. See the picture below.

The above picture is Unit of Analysis of Ecological Interaction which is a method I developed in July 2020. The ecology view focuses on the “organism—environment” relationship. It suggests each and every living organism has its specific surrounding medium of environment called niche. An organism is also part of other organisms’ environment. Following this general view, I consider “ecological interaction” as “people interacting with their surrounding context” and see “social interaction” as a subset of “ecological interaction” because we can consider other people as social context.

You can find more details in The Center of the “Ecological Interaction” Thematic Space.

Most sociologists work on the social and cultural levels. They consider issues such as Agency, Power, Politics, Capital, Field, Discourse, Structure, etc.

It is clear that this is my blind spot. I’d like to say thank you to Jenny Davis because her book offers me an opportunity of critical sociological enlightenment.

Today, her thread about ChatGPT inspires me to rethink Curativity Theory from a critical sociological perspective.

What’s Curativity?

I coined the term “Curativity” in 2018 when I was working on developing a theory about curation.

See the screenshot below. I compared a set of terms about Curation with Creation and Organization, then I coined the new term “Curativity”.

What’s the difference between Curation and Creation? Both Curation and Creation aim to make a meaningful whole, Curation needs to Group a set of things together in order to make a new meaningful whole while Creation can Combine a set of things to make a brand new thing.

For Curation, the original things keep their forms and content, but the context of these things is changed. For Creation, the original things disappear because the new whole is not a grouped whole, but a combined whole.

In order to highlight the ontological difference between Curation and Creation, I coined the new term “Curativity”. On Oct 3, 2018, I realized this insight and decided to use the term to name the new theory.

Eventually, I wrote a book titled Curativity: The Ecological Approach to General Curation Practice.

In fact, the book offers two theories:

An Ontological Theory of Curativity
An Ecological Practice Approach to Curativity

The ontological theory of Curativity aims to establish a new concept called Curativity which is different from Creativity.

What’s Curativity? See the diagram below. The diagram below shows the third element of Curativity: Container. The basic assumption behind the diagram and the new term is: “In order to effectively curate pieces into a meaningful whole, we need Containers to contain pieces and shape them.”

Pieces, Container, and Whole together form a triad which is the basic unit of analysis of Curativity theory. Also, this unit of analysis establishes a new theoretical category at the ontological level. The concept of Curativity indicates three statuses of things:

Things-in-Pieces
Things-in-Container
Things-in-Whole

Curativity theory is all about understanding the structure and dynamics of these three statuses.

I also developed a theoretical approach called the “Gibson — Lakoff — Schön” account as a solution for understanding “Curativity”. Later, I named it the Ecological Practice Approach.

From 2019 to 2022, I worked on the Ecological Practice Approach and expanded it from Curativity to Attachance, Supportance, Thematic Space, and Genidentity.

How can we claim that Curativity is an ontological innovation?

There are many theoretical approaches to understanding Creativity. If people consider “Curativity” as a primary theme for their research and develop new theoretical approaches to it, then it will establish its ontological position.

The Critical Sociological Approach

What if we use critical sociology to study Curativity?

I designed the picture below to capture this significant insight. It is not only about ChatGPT, but also about the ontological innovation of Curativity.

The above picture highlights a clue: The Power and Politics of Smart Curation.

What’s Smart Curation?

What’s the difference between Smart Curation and Algorithmic Curation or Machine Driven Curation?

It is the same thing with different names.

In 2016, Michael Bhaskar suggested a hybrid model in his book Curation. He said, “Selection is about finding the right things. Defining what is ‘right’ in any given context can’t be boiled down to the information analysed by a machine. Which is not to say machines aren’t valuable — they are, and will be a massive part of curatorial business over the next century. But we will see a balance. Human and algorithmic curation working together, complementing each other.” (p.115)

Source: Curation (Michael Bhaskar, 2016. p.117)

Though Bhaskar talked about business curation, his insight on the complementation between human-driven curation and machine-driven curation can be applied to discussing creative actions.

We can use “Smart Curation” as a theme that defines a rough boundary of a thematic space. Also, we can Human-driven Curation and Machine-driven Curation as two operational concepts for further discussion.

Michael Bhaskar’s model can be applied to not only Platforms but also Products and Services.

Yesterday, OpenAI launched an API for Chat GPT.

We will see an emerging Value Chain around Smart Curation. It is more complicated than Michael Bhaskar’s original model of Platform Curation.

From the perspective of theoretical reflection, we need to rethink many ideas about Curativity and Smart Curation in particular.

What’s a Piece in Smart Curation?

What are Containers in Smart Curation?

What’s a Meaningful Whole in Smart Curation?

Who is the curator?

Who is the audience?

We can start with the General Curation Framework.

The above diagram highlights several pairs of concepts:

Pieces v.s. Whole
Whole v.s. Container
Collect v.s. Present
Actor v.s. Audience
Experience v.s. Theme

As an application of Curativity Theory, the above General Curation Framework represents the structure and dynamics of general curation practice. The activity of general curation aims to collect pieces of things into a meaningful whole in order to present a theme to a group audience.

There are three immanent contradictions within the activity of curating: “pieces — whole”, “things — themes” and “curator — audience”. For the first dichotomy, I use the concept of “Container” to balance the pieces and whole. For the last dichotomy, I use the notion of “Everyone A Curator” to deconstruct the concept of “Curator” because I want to claim that the activity of curating is a general social practice.

The dichotomy of “things — themes” refers to two classical great debates of social science: “mind — matter” and “individual — collective.” After reviewing the concept of “theme” in various disciplines such as Cultural Anthropology, Counseling Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and the Philosophy of Science, I developed a new concept “Themes of Practice” to propose a process view of “Theme.”

The General Curation Framework identifies three types of containers:

Physical Containers: Shipping containers, Bowls, Rooms, Places…
Social Containers: Families, Communities, Schools, Groups, Events…
Cognitive Containers: Frameworks, Concepts, Diagrams, Models, Theories…

In fact, we can consider them as three dimensions for understanding the concept of Container. For example, a book is both a physical container and a cognitive container.

Based on the above ideas of Curativity Theory, we can use Critical Sociology to reflect on these pairs of concepts.

Cast Studies

Deep Agency: AI-generated Models and Photography Industry

March 23, 2023

Danny Postma, a full-stack developer who builds Al apps, has launched a new model agency based on deep AI. No cameras, no photographers, no makeup artist, no nothing. Just a solopreneur.

The Beta mode is ready and you can make amazing things like hire models that do not exist or create your twin. It is called Deep Agency.

Alice Robertson’s comment:

It’s also fascinating to consider the potential for models to license their likenesses through Metahumans, and for photographers to do the same via their portfolios and prompt engineering.

Artificial Fluency — Semiotic Laws of Motion & Abductive Coupling

Sept 4, 2023

Carlos E. Perez is writing a book titled Artificial Fluency — Semiotic Laws of Motion & Abductive Coupling. Artificial Fluency takes the view of language as agential matter and explains the development and future progress of GPT-like systems using semiotics and the ideas of coupling in computer science.