Naturalising the Black Box: Intersubjectivity in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence Between Brand Discourses and Public Controversies

The accelerated spread of artificial intelligence tools is radically changing the consumption of technologies, which are becoming more and more “naturally” embedded in people's daily lives, soliciting and stabilizing new forms of intersubjective and interobjective relations. This inevitably impacts the roles and meanings attributed to devices, now designed to favor an increasingly immediate and apparently intuitive use. In this scenario, the presence of two mutually reinforcing processes of signification emerges: naturalization and, related to it, anthropomorphism. The first one, from the perspective of semiotics, is a meaning effect resulting from specific ways of valorizing, enunciating and narrating a technology that make its presence in everyday life ‘obvious’, ‘natural’, and ‘ordinary’. Anthropomorphism, on the other hand, goes far beyond the projection of human qualities onto technological non-humans, rather – taking up Bruno Latour's perspective – consists in the symmetrical ability of technical objects to redefine the very forms of human lives, which are still struggling to free themselves from anthropocentric prejudices. Considering the renewed semiotic interest for the Latourian investigation on the modes of existence and paradoxes of contemporaneity, this volume aims to explore the processes of signification implicated in the new forms of cohabitation of humans and non-humans, focusing on the interdependence between consumption, technology, society and culture, with particular attention to the role played by brands. Specifically, the aim of this volume’s contributions is to show how semiotics can operate on two intertwined levels. The first relates to the willingness of brands driving technological innovation to resort to symbols, narratives and discourses, in other words: to the communication of values that is generated when humans rely on technology, delegating to objects an ever-widening set of thematic and narrative roles that culminate in the depiction of a desirable and idealized everyday-coexistence. The second consists in the adoption of semiotics as a discipline with a critical vocation for social phenomena and prefigures research spaces that are as promising as they are challenging. - What methodologies can be employed to effectively study devices that rely on interactions between humans, non-human instances, and intangible elements (such as algorithms) to construct meaning? - How to rethink the key notions of enunciation, veridiction, hybrid and anthropomorphism in the light of the expressive forms produced by artificial intelligence? - How to account for the complex workings of AI in the light of the notions of translation and multimodality? And what challenges does this scenario pose to such key notions? - How to account for the role assumed by market-leading brands in mitigating consumer resistance to the adoption of these devices? - What kind of life forms emerge and stabilize when humans accept to delegate knowledge, passions and actions to devices endowed with unprecedented levels of agency? - How is AI self-represented? - What is the meaning of the new human-non-human hybrids?