The phenomenological mediation of the screen can make it very hard to tell these different kinds of connector apart. In a recent post, the historian of belief Francis Young makes an intriguing argument which expands on this. Young argues that the reception of AI, across the public and the scholarly spheres, has shifted society towards a new epistemology of knowledge, where content produced by LLMs is perceived as literal ground truth. For example, that a LLM can internalise the extant works of Livy, and then produce the 107 books of his that are lost – that it can literarily produce the lost works of Livy.
This is the context of my question – can AI be literally superstitious? This is meant to be more of a provocation than a literal question. What I want to provoke us to consider is a comparison between AI generated content -the logic of the algorithm, driven by theoretically limitless computational power over billions of training datasets across the Web – with the complete absence of logic inherent in superstition. Is there a meaningful difference between the two? This is what I think the Digital Folklorist of the future will have to figure out.