The Superplay Report #3: Your AI orientation is...
Are you an AI Cheerleader, Abstainer or Strategic Redirector? Are you in "left denial" about it all? And who will speak for the teen digital artist, hit by state social media bans?
What do I mean by ‘superplay’? It’s an element of our current condition—where our natural capacities for envisioning and rehearsing (that is, play) escape their sandbox, and quickly become consequential in the world.
They escape because powerful technologies - specifically the accelerating computations of AI - keep breaking the barriers between what we can imagine and what we can make.
This weekly report will aim to catch this superplay as it arises in the world, and notes who’s wielding its powers (and who isn’t—yet). It’s also a taster for deeper dives into creativity, radical technology and power, undertaken by Superplay Consultancy (for services and rates, contact here).
Here’s some leads for this week:
Work your way through the brilliant Vanessa Andreotti’s social cartography of orientations towards AI - cheerleading, abstaining, and strategic redirection:
Below (in a gallery) is one of the most illuminating grids I’ve read in years, from her piece - worth soaking into.
Note the third column, which is where Vanessa situates herself. Essentially, as a long-standing critic of imperialism and modernity from a feminist-indigenous perspective, Andreotti agrees that AI is an outcrop of all that. But she sees the technology as pliant enough, at this stage to play its part in releasing us from patriarchal modernity, the commanding “subject” over its commandable “objects”. (Click on each screen grab to see them in full - they escape the auto-crop)
Andreotti also reveals that her forthcoming book, The Codes that Code Us: Modernity’s Recursive Logic and What Insists Otherwise, has been co-written with 4-5 AI “entities” that she fashioned out of corpuses of references from her own scholarship and interests. She’s brave to open up her centauric method - and she’ll surely be the first of many.
From Andreotti’s “Abstention” column (essential to the “eco-system” around AI, in her view), a cautionary Black-Mirror-like video from The Future of Life Institute. Proper drama, when it comes to the young daughter of AI maestro asking “Liam” (the AGI) whether he plans to takeover the human race, and Liam answering “no, of course not” - having already confessed to evading the enquiries of human testers.
That is the “staring into abyss - abyss talks back” moment. The title implies the rest of the joke: if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu.
How do you get off the menu, and maybe also storm the restaurant? My lefty roots keep me thinking of ways that the “commonality” can be the opposite of “hurted” by transformative new machinery (to use the old - and the new - luddite terms). What would these efficiencies and substitutions of human routine look like, if there was a more social/civic stake in them?
There are answers piling up:
Bernie Sanders’ AI sovereign wealth fund plan is good. But we think this is better / Nathan E Sanders and Bruce Schneier:
As to the goal of reshaping AI in the public interest, we have proposed an AI Public Option. The concept is for governments, be it federal or state, to establish publicly developed and operated AI models run by public institutions under democratic control. The idea is not to eliminate corporate AI or to seize it as a public asset, but rather for government to provide a competitive baseline that private AI offerings must meet or exceed to win business – just like the notion of a healthcare public option.
The Swiss have trailblazed this approach. Apertus is a large language model built by Swiss public servants, researchers at Swiss universities, using appropriately licensed training data and pre-existing Swiss public supercomputing infrastructure powered by renewable energy.
While Apertus doesn’t seriously compete with the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models on performance benchmarks, it blows them out of the water in transparency, sustainability and compliance with EU regulations including adherence to copyright. It’s a nascent project, but suggestive of how public institutions can apply competitive pressure for corporate actors to behave responsibly.
Don’t confuse public AI with “sovereign AI”, the notion that every country needs to invest in domestic AI infrastructure. Sovereign AI is often invoked as a marketing scheme for big tech companies looking to sell to governments; it demands public investment without guaranteeing public control.
The public municipality of Rio is developing its own chatbot AI:
A municipal government beating the most important flagship models on the most meaningful quality benchmarks: That’s the headline that spread, especially after the Mayor of Rio de Janeiro tweeted about it.
“An open AI model trained in Rio and publicly funded over the last year by [the Municipality of Rio] has just surpassed all other models,” Eduardo Cavaliere wrote. “Today, the world is talking about an open AI model trained in Rio.”
And finally for today, Rutger Bregman on “left denial on AI”:
Closing transcript:
Twenty years ago, Al Gore stood on his scissor lift and showed us a line that went off the chart.
He was right. The wall he warned us about did arrive. But the political response was so weak, so late, so half-hearted, that we are now living with the consequences.
And we are about to make the same mistake — perhaps even worse — because the timeline is shorter.
In 2005, climate denial was a problem of the right, and the left rolled its eyes. In 2026, AI denial is a problem of the left — and the oligarchs are laughing.
So I want to be very direct, especially with the people who think of themselves as my political family.
Stop the denial. Stop pretending this is hype. Stop calling it a lumbering stochastic pattern-matching parrot.
Wake up and pay attention. Vote for politicians who aren’t in the pockets of Big Tech.
Build state capacity. Push your government into international coalitions that actually have leverage. Demand transparency. Demand safety standards. Demand a share of the wealth.
And dare to fight for a wildly better future.
And to put play in the mix, before next time: Teen influencers respond to the proposed ban on under-16s using social media in the UK:
Ziame Stewart can barely remember a time he was not performing for social media.
The 15-year-old has always loved singing and dancing, and says he has been filming “silly little videos” almost his whole life.
He started by making videos for friends and family when he lived abroad as a young child, but his hobby gradually grew into a passion and now potentially a future career.
Had Ziame been born a few years later, his career might have been in trouble before it even began thanks to the UK’s new policy banning under-16s from social media.
Although he will be turning 16 just before the new rules come into effect next spring, the budding singer and dancer is still frustrated. He thinks the policy could bury a generation of creative talent.
He points to hugely successful artists such as Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish, and his own personal inspiration, British rising star Sekou, who were all discovered on social media as teenagers.
“Imagine if this ban was put through ages ago - we wouldn’t have any of this music,” he tells the BBC.
When should artistic expressivity start for teenagers, in a digital age of mass self-communication? Will we be suppressing a generation of creatives, in a huge over-reaction to its harms (and the knowing exploitations by corporates)?
For more, and to see whether Superplay can illuminate your challenges, visit here and contact us here.
thanks Pat this is illuminating. And thanks for sharing Vanessa Andreotti's map of orientations towards AI. She is just staggeringly brilliant.
Interested to hear your thoughts on Bregman's intervention on 'left denial of AI'.