Editors’ Summary: This post considers the relationship between AI and book history. According to Cordell, the chat box relies on a flawed skeuomorphism that misleads users, obscuring rather than revealing the relationship between users’ inputs and the language model systems’ outputs. This post proposes the skeuomorph as a key heuristic for book historical scholarship and the work of book labs. He theorizes skeuomorphism as an embodied cultural critique, drawing on historical praxis to perceive the technical, social, and political operations of media technology that can be opaque in any present.
Editors’ Choice: A Skeuomorphic View of Book History
