The Critical Computation Bureau (CCB) commissioned us to prompt Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), an AI language generator, to contribute to a conversation concerning topics broached during the December 2020 symposium Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence, and Speculative Computation. Together, we presented the machine with the following questions: “As an AI, what am I hiding? What must I keep silent?”
With this prompt, we aimed to encourage the AI to produce self-reflexive text about knowledge and opacity, computational orders of rules, and the seemingly hidden dimensions of recursive machine reasoning. As the CCB states, “Recursivity is epistemology. It is the function that entangles cosmogonies within colonial epistemologies. It is the condition of reproduction of racialized algorithms.” Would GPT-3’s text reflect these rules of reproduction outright? Would it keep them hidden? Or might its response gesture toward the invention of new epistemological possibilities, ones rendered indecipherable by the grammars of the present and which abandon the structural coupling of concealing and revealing implied in the prompt?
In the following reflections and replies, we take up the missive of the machine, using both speculative and critical methodologies in the service of the CCB’s stated goal to treat GPT-3 as an alien or heretical form of machine intelligence that ramifies and refashions the order of techno-racial-capitalism. GPT-3 is no second-rate interlocutor; its message to us, full of baleful proclamations and religious musings, lends itself to unexpected understandings of computational epistemology.
