The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI

This commentary starts with the question ‘How is it that AI has come to be figured uncontroversially as a thing, however many controversies “it” may engender?’ Addressing this question takes us to knowledge practices that philosopher of science Helen Verran has named a ‘hardening of the categories’, processes that not only characterise the onto-epistemology of AI but also are central to its constituent techniques and technologies. In a context where the stabilization of AI as a figure enables further investments in associated techniques and technologies, AI's status as controversial works to reiterate both its ontological status and its agency. It follows that interventions into the field of AI controversies…