Blackness and AI

The euphoria and skepticism about AI that is found in the field of digital studies should not come as a surprise. The dream of a day when artificial intelligence transforms society is decades, if not centuries, old. Moreover, this imagined technologized utopia is often racialized in ways both obvious and subtle.¹ This excitement burst into full view when Open AI quietly released ChatGPT-3.5 to the general public in late November 2022. This conversational context-generating chatbot can create code, draft essays, write poetry, and produce content for a host of text-driven tasks. This and similar tools fulfill many technophilic desires, but