ChatGPT has become a cultural sensation, an icon of generative artificial intelligence’s promise or threat. But ChatGPT and technologies like it are not just popular, but popular culture encoded. In this lecture, Dr. McKelvey will argue that generative AI is a product of popular culture in that machine learning encodes what it collects from societies and cultures into predictions that drive content generation. By describing the production of large AI models, he will challenge us to re-think how we care for popular culture, the risks of new kinds of information feudalism, and the importance of an information commons.

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