Featuring 33 chapters and the editors’ introduction, this Handbook provides a groundbreaking collection of anthropological research on artificial intelligence (AI), examining how anthropology can help to comprehend and critique its development. Evaluating the limits, hopes and fears of AI, leading experts explore its influence as a sociocultural phenomenon rather than a discrete technological system.
This chapter develops “prompt ethnography” as a critical methodology to scrutinize generative AI. Prompt ethnography employs reflexive interactions with generative models and public controversies around model behaviors as empirical touchstones to draw inferences about why AI models say what they say about politically charged topics, and interrogate the larger structures of power that define the code, content and consternations undergirding model outputs. It is published in the Handbook of Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence (edited by Udupa S. & Hervik P., Edward Elgar)
In this chapter, Sahana Udupa suggests that WhatsApp’s unique role in disinformation and vitriolic ecosystems in contexts of divisive politics lies not as much in the architectural features of encryption but around particular clusters of social relations it enters, entrenches and reshapes. The chapter develops the concept of “deep extreme speech”. It centers community allegiances in distribution logics, framing extreme content as part of the everyday.