I’ve been working with the metaphor of digital plastic for some time now: first to sketch the “geological layer” GenAI is leaving throughout the online in Digital plastic: Generative AI and the digital ecosystem, then to unpack manufacturing and that means in The Semiotics of Artificial Media: Manufacturing and That means in Digital Plastic, and extra not too long ago to ask whether or not the flood is miraculous—or graceless slop—in Digital Plastic: Miraculous substance or graceless slop?.
In a brand new peer-reviewed article with Jasper Roe and Mike Perkins, we develop the metaphor additional and situate it in multiliteracies and Important AI Literacy (CAIL): Digital plastic: a metaphorical framework for CAIL within the multiliteracies period. The brief model: like bodily plastics, GenAI outputs are low cost, malleable, ubiquitous, and protracted. That blend creates entry and creativity and air pollution and inequity.
Digital Plastic in apply
Listed below are a number of concepts for utilizing this idea within the classroom. Learn the paper above for extra.
1) Deal with artificial media as a “materials” with properties.
When college students (or workers) use GenAI, get them to call the properties they’re selecting: pliable, quick, homogeneous, biased, persistent. Ask essential questions concerning the goal of artificial media, like: What does this artificial media do effectively? What would possibly it hurt? Tie that again to the ecosystem thought within the unique publish.
2) Design for deliberate multimodal use.
Don’t essentially ban the “plastic” – however be ready to specify the intent and the utility. If the aim of a lesson is media creation, take into account the implications of text-to-video or image-to-video technology. Younger folks can have rising entry to those applied sciences, particularly as corporations like Meta companion with corporations like Midjourney. The examples under are brief movies generated within the latter platform. What does social media appear like when each individual on Instagram, Threads, Fb or Whatsapp have free and on-demand entry to this?
And this “digital plastic” is already beginning to prolong into extra interactive multimodal texts like playable videogames. The under, from Mirage 2, was created utilizing a nonetheless picture (generated in Midjourney) and a textual content immediate. Within the video you’ll see me controlling the character utilizing my keyboard, working, leaping, and looking out round. It’s very early days and very glitchy. Primarily the mannequin is producing new photos at round 30 frames per second. However what does this appear like in two years’ time?
3) Make provenance a part of the design transient.
Multimodal submissions that use GenAI embrace a brief “provide chain” of knowledge provenance: prompts, instruments, fashions, filters, and what was stored/modified, but in addition an evaluation of the place the fashions’ coaching knowledge got here from, and different related processes. That behavior each demystifies the method and foregrounds essential judgement: precisely what we would like when the default “large tech” place is frictionless technology. I discover the semiotic facet of this within the semiotics publish.
Metaphors as a toolkit for CAIL
I wrote about why metaphors for Important AI Literacy will be helpful in a earlier article, Utilizing Metaphors to Educate Important AI Literacy, which hyperlinks to our open-access JIME publication, Reflecting Actuality, Amplifying Bias? Utilizing Metaphors to Educate Important AI Literacy. If “digital plastic” helps with persistence, air pollution and affordances, pair it with AI as map (illustration and energy), funhouse mirror (distortion), or black field (opacity). Use every metaphor to ask: who advantages, who’s absent, what counts as proof, and when ought to we refuse the device? The JIME piece additionally contains some ready-to-run actions.
The metaphor of “digital plastic” retains two truths in view: GenAI might widen entry to multimodal composition, and it might completely flatten our digital commons. Framed this manner, we don’t chase hype or panic; we design for goal, insist on provenance, and educate the habits that maintain human judgement central even when the fabric is artificial.
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