Jul 2026· Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies· 0 citations· 2 references
TL;DR
This review reads the book alongside the regulatory architecture being built on the same theory of agency: the EU AI Act, the harmonised standards beneath it, the UNESCO and OECD ethics frameworks above, and the November 2025 Digital Omnibus provisionally agreed upon in May 2026.
Abstract
David Eliot trained as a card magician before turning to AI research. His Artificially Intelligent sets out to democratise AI for general readers, and on its own terms it succeeds: the history is rich, the writing is clear, and the central argument that AI is socially constructed and democratically redirectable is held with conviction. This review reads the book alongside the regulatory architecture being built on the same theory of agency: the EU AI Act, the harmonised standards beneath it, the UNESCO and OECD ethics frameworks above, and the November 2025 Digital Omnibus provisionally agreed upon in May 2026. The argument here is additive, not corrective. Knowing the trick is not the same as breaking it. The real subject of magic is attention, not secrets. Alongside AI ethics and governance literature, the magician’s eye points to what visibility cannot reach: the case for a code of practice from inside a profession that understands attention management.
This article addresses the question of the ‘magic of AI’ from two interrelated perspectives: first, as a form of belief in the seemingly magical or miraculous ability of AI to replicate human-like knowledge, intelligence and creativity; and second, as a kind of magic trick used by the tech companies to make users believe in AI's extraordinary powers. By reframing AI as both a system of belief and a ritualistic marketing practice, the article argues for a shift of focus away from abstract philosophical debates about AI's existential risks towards a more ethnographically grounded analysis of how such illusions of magic – of AI's intelligence and creativity – are produced and sustained in the first place. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of how text-to-image (TTI) AI models represent controversial historical events such as the 1984 Ethiopian famine, the article shows how AI systems work by recycling a narrow set of visual tropes in their training data that have very little to do with human notions of intelligence or creativity. Underpinning the popular discourse of AI as magic we can thus find an emerging system of power in which tech companies sell the ‘miracle’ version of AI, while users receive only the ‘magic trick’.
Matti Pohjonen· Anthropological Theory· 0 citations
This essay contends that reading is nothing less than a validation of our shared humanity. However, the author’s joyful reading is increasingly disturbed by the dearth of reading in society at large. Missing is the focused attention on a single passage, unadorned by images, uninterrupted by alerts, unlit by a screen—simply text on paper. But in a world where celebrities appear shinier and happier than anyone in real life, black letters on a white background look like a failure, even aesthetically: too plain, too severe, too boring. For the author, that simplicity is part of the point: letters that do not call attention to themselves but rather to the ideas they signal. Digital media fractures our attention, while reading requires us to maintain focus on something other than ourselves. Reading thus resists two dominant cultural trends: the solipsism of life online and the impulse to move on to whatever is newer, hotter, or simply more outrageous.
Vedic philosophy is not merely a textual inheritance, it is a living performance tradition, inseparable from sound, breath, ritual gesture, and the relational space between teacher and student. The emergence of Digital Humanities as a dominant paradigm for the preservation and dissemination of classical knowledge systems raises questions that are particularly acute for this tradition. This paper examines the intersection of Vedic performing arts including oral recitation, ritual enactment, and commentarial pedagogy with the computational and archival tools of Digital Humanities. It argues that digital platforms and artificial intelligence, while enabling unprecedented access to rare Vedic resources, simultaneously risk severing philosophical content from its performative ground. The paper further investigates the role of English as a mediating language within global knowledge circuits, proposing that translation must be understood as an ethical and interpretive act rather than a mechanical transfer. Drawing on posthuman theory, postcolonial epistemology, and media studies, this paper calls for a human-centered framework of digital mediation that holds together accessibility and philosophical depth, archival innovation and cultural accountability.
Anita Goswami, Hemlata Negi· ShodhKosh Journal of Visual...· 0 citations
Research on artificial intelligence (AI) frequently highlights the technology's inherent unpredictability – often captured through the metaphor of the ’black box’ – which makes it difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to determine how particular results are produced. These discussions typically culminate in debates about ethics, reliability and responsibility, yet they say relatively little about how those working with and developing AI themselves relate to this mystification. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among two distinct groups in the South Indian city of Bengaluru – artists experimenting creatively with AI and data scientists developing AI-powered applications – this article examines how practitioners engage with the technology's perceived opacity. Many interlocutors acknowledged that beyond a certain threshold, they could no longer fully explain how ‘their’ AI systems arrived at particular decisions or outputs. Instead, they frequently invoked expressions such as ‘that's the magic of it’ or described their work as a form of ‘geek wizardry’. Taking these formulations seriously, the article explores how the seemingly ‘unexplainable’ aspects of AI come to be experienced as magical. Rather than dismissing such language as metaphor, it approaches these references as part of the ways practitioners make sense of technologies that appear to exceed their own knowledge and explanatory frameworks. Drawing on Ernesto De Martino's theorization of magic – particularly his emphasis on context, history and meaning – the article argues that references to ‘AI as magic’ help situate rapidly evolving technological systems within everyday lifeworlds. In a field where developments occur at extraordinary speed and even specialists struggle to remain fully up to date, the language of magic provides a way of articulating encounters with systems whose operations remain only partially intelligible. By placing practitioners’ own descriptions of AI within broader anthropological discussions of magic, the article offers a new perspective on how people live with and interpret the opacity of contemporary algorithmic systems.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt reimagines the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Rather than treating them as two adjacent fields, she situates aesthetic perception before ideological thinking. If totalitarian movements are distinguished by their disdain for sensual reality, as Arendt argues, resistance must begin by rehabilitating the aesthetic sensibilities that ground ethical judgment and political action. In recent years, Arendt has been widely invoked as a prophet of the present, making The Origins of Totalitarianism a surprise bestseller. But the book ends with only a side glance toward the future, leaving the reader with a devastating diagnosis and no treatment plan. This article draws on Arendt’s conception of aesthesis as embodied perception to reassess how two of her contemporaries, Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Nabokov, sought to redefine the roles of philosophy and art in a culture dominated by ideology.
Patrick Eichholz· American Literature· 0 citations
The emergence of generative AI has precipitated an ontological crisis vis-à-vis Philippine creative economy, challenging deeply held definitions of art, authorship, and cultural identity. Rooted in a tradition that prizes manual craftsmanship and the communal spirit, the Philippine context views art not merely as a final product, rather as a holistic process defined by human labor, intent, and lived experience. This paper examines the friction between autonomous algorithmic reproduction and the aura of human-led creation through an evaluative methodology of academic inquiries, institutional policies, and digital discourse. The analysis reveals how cultural gatekeepers, including major art competitions and the governmental agencies, are reinforcing boundaries that exclude AI from the realm of fine art to preserve the sanctity of the human hand and the struggle of the creative process. Furthermore, the study explores the legal limitations of the Philippine Intellectual Property Code (RA 8293), which restricts authorship to "natural persons," and investigates public backlash against AI integration in media. Through an axiological lens, the research identifies a generational divide where digital natives may accept AI as a tool for hybridity, while the broader cultural consensus remains anchored in Pakikipagkapwa-tao (shared identity). Hence, the Philippine perspective suggests that while AI may function as an efficient tool for "automated commodities," it lacks the emotional resonance and accountability required for true Likha. In this cultural vista, art remains an irreducibly human communicative act.