Autografon, maszyna do pisania, ChatGPT – techniki wytwarzania nieludzkich podmiotów

Abstract

The article deals with the relation between techniques of automatic writing in spiritualism, writing on a typewriter, and computerized text generation by ChatGPT. The article interprets the historical continuity between past media and contemporary software. The research method is based on media archaeology. The author assumes that media and the technical practices surrounding them are discoursive in nature. The author analyses such topics as: the imagined characteristics of spiritual techniques that attempted to reduce human involvement in writing, so the non-human spiritual subjects can take over the practice; the mechanical and industrial aspects of typewriting; and how the afromentioned discourses converge in ChatGPT. The analysis shows, how the contemporary fascination with automatic text generation by chatbots stems from the technical discourse at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and how this discourse aims to create non-human, writing subjects.