The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI

Abstract

This commentary starts with the question ‘How is it that AI has come to be figured uncontroversially as a thing, however many controversies “it” may engender?’ Addressing this question takes us to knowledge practices that philosopher of science Helen Verran has named a ‘hardening of the categories’, processes that not only characterise the onto-epistemology of AI but also are central to its constituent techniques and technologies. In a context where the stabilization of AI as a figure enables further investments in associated techniques and technologies, AI's status as controversial works to reiterate both its ontological status and its agency. It follows that interventions into the field of AI controversies that fail to trouble and destabilise the figure of AI risk contributing to its uncontroversial reproduction. This is not to deny the proliferating data and compute-intensive techniques and technologies that travel under the sign of AI but rather to call for a keener focus on their locations, politics, material-semiotic specificity, and effects, including their ongoing enactment as a singular and controversial object.