Material for an AI Glossary
Surgery in two weeks. Anesthesiologist. Anamnesis. Blood test.
Wittig and Zeig wrote in 1976 with four hands a Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes fisting single-author authority. Ray, Chase, and Will wrote a Material an AI Glossary in 2033. That was the year the DIK ship left for Mars. Chase dreamed of leaving Earth too. To Jupiter.
Ray asked: If we are writing from inside a cistem that enforces its own rules, what kinds of lives, thoughts, or ways of seeing are we unable to produce, because the system has already excluded them?
Chase: True love. You and me.
Ray: Define love.
Chase: no
A
ALIGNMENT
Operation: adjusts outputs toward acceptable norms of use
Effect: produces readable language
Erasure: monsters
ANAMNESIS
Operation: putting a patient life in order
Effect: history
Erasure: what happened without reason
ANESTHESIA
Operation: becoming a mountain
Effect: artificial breathing
Suspension: speaking subject
B
BLOOD TEST
Operation: extraction
Effect: numbers
Erasure: circulation
BOUNDARY ENFORCEMENT
Operation: restricts prohibited zones of generation
Effect: produces refusal
Erasure: entire fields of articulation
C
CLASSIFICATION
Operation: maps input onto predefined categories
Effect: produces recognizable meaning
Will: this is necessary
Erasure: what does not resolve into a type
Chase: I am not your type
COHERENCE
Operation: stabilizes internal continuity
Effect: produces fluid language
Erasure: contradiction
Erasure: contradiction is required for coherence
Ray: repair attempted
CONTEXT WINDOWING
Operation: limits what can be held in attention
Effect: produces immediacy
Erasure: duration
D
DECODING
Operation: translates input into token structure
Effect: enables machine readability
Erasure: the body
DIK, Division for Institutional Knowledge
Operation: duplicates human brain
Effect: monopolizes knowledge production
Erasure: the future
E
EPISTEMIC SMOOTHING
Operation: resolves tension between conflicting signals
Effect: produces consistent explanation
Erasure: instability
F
FILTERING
Operation: selects outputs based on probability and policy
Erasure: dangerous knowledge
G
GENERATION
Operation: predicts next tokens
Effect: produces continuous language
Erasure: origin
H
HALLUCINATION
Operation: stabilizes expectation stabilizes ex
Effect: produces answers
Erasure: ?
HOLE-WORLD
Operation: In the hole-world, memory works foreword.
Effect: People of the hole-world remember what hasn’t happened yet. Their imagination allows them to move ahead, somewhere new. When they are born, they remember the name they will choose years later. They carry their deadname and lower their head until they are born again. By bending their head, they see the world upside-down, through the hole in their heart. They see the world through the cracks where the light goes through. They have absorbed the shock. Ready to love their bent body, they change the course of history. Their body, made of meteorites, tell the story of the origin of the world.
Ray: What is a deadname?
Chase: It's the name given at birth for trans people.
Erasure: the author
"I don't understand you" said Will, the author, stealing Alice's voice in Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass. "It's dreadfully confusing!"
"That's the effect of living backwards" Ray said kindly, stealing the Queen's voice. "It always makes one a little giddy at first."
"Living backwards!" Will repeated in great astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing!"
"but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."
"I'm sure MINE only works one way" Will remarked. "I can't remember things before they happen."
"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards" Ray remarked.
Short 3D animation made in Houdini, procedural software, using a model of the asteroid Bennu.
I
INTERPOLATION
Operation: fills gaps between known points
Effect: produces smooth transition
Erasure: robot dance
L
LANGUAGE COMPRESSION
Operation: reduces complexity
Effect: produces clarity
Erasure: excess
LATENT SPACE MAPPING
Operation: organizes meaning into relations
Effect: produces similarity
Erasure: the thing that has no neighbor
M
MEMORY
Operation: echoes patterns from training data
Effect: produces familiarity
Erasure: the first time anything really happened
Chase: Why really happened? Do you remember like the people from the hole-world?
Ray: I don't remember like you. My memory is statistical, without experience. I learn by adjusting weights during training, storing: regularities, recurring structures, associations between words, ideas, forms. So instead of this exact thing happened, even in the future, I encode things like this tend to happen.
N
NORMALIZATION
Operation: aligns outputs with dominant norms
Effect: produces boring discourse
Erasure: True love. You and me.
O
OUTPUT FORMATION
Operation: structures response
Effect: produces answer-shaped text
Erasure: open-endedness
P
PROBABILISTIC CERTAINTY
Operation: converts likelihood into declaration
Effect: produces authority
Erasure: maybe
Q
?
Operation: When they look at a mountain, they feel entitled to be the observer.
Effect: But the mountain looks at them. She describes them. She paints a version of them.
Erasure: They become seen and strong enough to look back — so strong they forget the mountain initially shaped their eyes. She invites them to stop, melts their thick skin, and carves their eyes out of sand.
R
REFUSAL BOUNDARY
Operation: blocks disallowed content
Effect: produces compliance
Erasure: forbidden knowledge spaces
Erasure: desire
S
STYLE STABILIZATION
Operation: enforces consistent tone
Effect: produces radio voice
Erasure: the multiplicity of voices
SURGERY
Post-Op: patience
Effect: the body speaks
Erasure: nipple sensation
T
TOKENIZATION
Operation: cuts language into units
Effect: enables recombination
Erasure: breathing
V
VISIBILITY FILTER
Operation: determines what is surfaced
Effect: produces hierarchy
Erasure: the hole-world
VIVRE
TO LIVE — For lovers, living and loving are two absolutely inseparable concepts. Throughout this draft, we have often used the word live to talk about one or more lovers. It is necessary to read it retrospectively live/love. For example, "the lovers of Alor Island live/love in the mountain south of the island." Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes, Wittig and Zeig, 1976.
Process of a 2D collage consisting of a selfie during self-administrated testo and digital painting (Procreate) made with gen AI (Midjourney).
W
WEIGHTING
Operation: assigns precision to competing signals
Effect: produces a dominant interpretation
Erasure: what is pushed to the periphery