DISCUSSION: Love Language Models

For a long time, creative communities developing with technical architecture and digital infrastructures have had to navigate in a double reality. The blessing of openness, rooted in utopian ideas of liberation through technology, is increasingly being replaced by systems that restrict and close access, in which platforms and tools function simultaneously as instruments of control and instruments of liberation, which is why this openness becomes a curse. Directors from the music industry are shifting to the defense technology and autonomous weapons sectors, and AI is increasingly intertwined with the political and cultural sphere. In this discussion with journalist and writer Liz Pelly, theorist and researcher Mark Polix, and theorist and artist Roberto Alonso Trillo, moderated by Wassim Z. Alsindi, we will look at how affect and imagination can offer asymmetric opposition to these phenomena. Drawing on economic science fiction and counter-hegemonic futures from other worlds, we will explore how lust, ingenuity, and speculative thinking can restore us to dignity and agency.