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AI Stickers


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Robbie Fordyce
23 May 2025
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On some stickers that I made for my students

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  1. Overview
02. Stickers
0X. References

01. Overview

From February to May 2025 I taught the unit Working with Artificial Intelligence, which was a pretty enjoyable experience overall, despite a few minor hurdles. Due to other commitments, I’m not going to be as focused on teaching it in 2026 although I’ll still have some connection to the unit -- probably lectures and some unit coordination.

    As a fun little exercise for myself, I made up a bunch of sticker designs that speak to different parts of the unit. They’re deliberately on the more entertaining side of interpretations of the scholarship, but hopefully in this they remain at least somewhat ‘fun’ for the students. I’d like it to be a positive and memorable experience for those involved.

    I’ve requested a print run of the stickers -- only about 50 sheets as they’re expensive enough and I’m paying for these myself -- but still, something that I hope the students will enjoy. You’ll find the PDF version of the stickers here.

    02. Stickers

    I’ve noted the individual stickers below, with a little bit of detail on what each one refers to.
    Upload Me: a reference to Katherine Hayles’ description of Moravec’s ‘digital liposuction’ that she refers to in How We Became Posthuman (pp. 1-3).So Hot Right Now: referring to the environmental destruction that is generally observed around the increased power draw demanded by the increase in global compute. This is covered in many resources and reportage, but in my unit this was addressed by the Green Web report “Thinking About Using AI?” by Smith, and in the “Stochastic Parrots” paper by Bender et al.I Don’t Think Anymore: building mostly on this reddit post, and a little bit on Stiegler and Hawking’s separate discussions of AI and exteriorisation/replacement.Enshittification: Lifted liberally from Cory Doctorow’s book cover. I only realise now that the poo is off-centre. In any case, the book hadn’t been released at the time I did these, so the students were primarily building their ideas from a couple of blogs by Doctorow from 2022 and 2024.Futurismo: We had a discussion of the role of il Futurismo as a precursor social/art movement that -- like AI ‘true believers’ -- were super into the idea of technology as a site for exploring their regressive political ideas. Different in important ways, but more similarities than not, including their contributions to the far-right movements of their day. LNI: This image has been taken liberally from the work of Os Keyes et al, in their fantastic paper “A Mulching Proposal”, which includes an image of an aging Henry Kissenger being airlifted by a drone into a meat processing plant for cannibalism purposes. Here we can see a little image of him with a convenient straw stuck into his brain.Vibe Coding: I taught my students how to ‘vibe code’ using Claude. Is that wise? No. Did it work well? Also no. Is this good cybersecurity practice? Again, no. But honestly given how many tech folk seem pretty happy with the aesthetically retrograde art that AI makes, I’m glad that there’s actually something about AI that gets some of their hackles up. In any case, it was memorable for us all in terms of how bad the sites were. Maybe it was also fun for the students. Teamwork: A little image of the Raft of the Medusa for us to all keep in mind when we think what teamwork can achieve under the right circumstances. The second of the cannibalism references in the unit in only two weeks!  0X. References

    Bender, E. M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Shmitchell, S. (2021). On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–623. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922

    Doctorow, C. (2022, November 17). Social Quitting. Medium. https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456

    Doctorow, C. (2024, January 30). My McLuhan lecture on enshittification. Medium. https://doctorow.medium.com/my-mcluhan-lecture-on-enshittification-ea343342b9bc

    Hawking, S., Russell, S., Tegmark, M., & Wilczek, F. (2014, May 1). Are we taking Artificial Intelligence seriously? The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificial-intelligence-but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html

    Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press.  

    Keyes, O., Hutson, J., & Durbin, M. (2019). A Mulching Proposal (No. arXiv:1908.06166). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1908.06166
     Smith, H., & Adams, C. (2024). Report: Thinking about using AI? - Green Web Foundation. https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/publications/report-ai-environmental-impact/
    Stiegler, B. (2016). Automatic society. Polity Press.  
    © Robbie Fordyce 2024[-o-] made on Wurundjeri Woi-Wurung country