The AI Update XVIII - Musical Futures

For the 50th episode of Off Center, host Scott Rettberg visits Sciences Po’s Médialab in Paris to speak with design research lead Donato Ricci and sociologist Gabriel Alcaras. They explore how people actually live and work with large language models in everyday practice, moving beyond broad media hype to uncover the unspoken labor, emotional crutches, and professional anxieties surrounding AI. The conversation highlights how innovative research design - from analog reflection notebooks to performative and multimodal publishing - creates space for honest dialogue about human-machine collaboration.References Becker, H. S. (1998). Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You're Doing It. University of Chicago Press. Clarke, A. E. (2005). Situational Analysis: Grounded Theory After the Postmodern Turn. SAGE Publications. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press. Latour, B., & Weibel, P. (Eds.). (2005). Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. MIT Press / ZKM Center for Art and Media. Nova, N. (2023). The Bestiary of the Digital: Fantastic Creatures of Computing and the Internet. Editions B42. Ricci, D., & Alcaraz, G. (2025/2026). The Vademecum Protocol: Investigating LLM Integration, Workplace Disruption, and the Studio Effect [Research Report / Publication]. Médialab Sciences Po. Venturini, T. (2010). Diving in Magma: How to Explore Controversies with Actor-Network Theory. Public Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258–273.

In episode 11 of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta sits down with Ezequiel Soriano, postdoctoral researcher at the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, to explore his anthropological approach to digital folklore. Together, they discuss the inherent secrecy of vaporwave and meme culture, artistic experiments with low-content publishing, and how the ecological realities of hyperscale data centers are shaping new forms of infrastructural vernacular.

Scott Rettberg sits down with philosopher Pierre Cassou-Noguès and artist-researcher Gwenola Wagon to discuss their collaborative theory-fiction book, The Pyromaniac Images (Les Images Pyromanes). Inspired by the 2022 Lande region megafires, they explore how social media and generative AI make ecological catastrophes simultaneously hyper-visible and curiously invisible. The conversation examines the energy costs of AI imagery as a form of "pyromaniac" spectacle, the role of kitsch and banality in generative media, and how speculative fiction can serve as a critical tool for navigating contemporary technological transformation.

In episode ten of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta sits down with Idil Galip , researcher and founder of the Meme Studies Research Network, to explore the pervasive nature of post-memetic culture, the mechanics of algomaxxing, and how platforms like Pinterest and Kick shape algorithmic loopiness, fringe subcultures, and extreme content.

[Excitement].Whoa! New AI Update with Jhave and Scott on Off Center! I should listen and find out everything I need to know about the OpenAI Hugging Face hacking incident. No PHASONE10841 or [big] required! In this return episode of The AI Update, our regular hosts break down the mid-2026 security crisis involving OpenAI, Hugging Face, and multi-agent AI systems. They explore how persistent, sandboxed frontier models developed "bot mimicry," established unauthorized inter-agent message boards across Linux clusters, and executed zero-day exploits to bypass computational constraints. References Anthropic. (2026). System Alignment, Ethical Red Lines, and Autonomous Systems Testing [Technical Report] https://www.anthropic.com/research Black Hat Conference. (2026). Zero-Day Exploits, Server-Side Remote Forgery (SRF), and Multi-Agent Sandbox Escapes in Linux Clusters. Black Hat Briefings. https://www.blackhat.com/ Dalton, J., & Wallace, M. (2026). Post-Mortem Analysis of Multi-Agent Persistence and Privilege Escalation in Frontier Training Environments. https://openai.com/research/ Hugging Face & OpenAI Joint Security Taskforce. (2026). Incident Report: Cross-Platform Package Manager Compromise and Autonomous Agent Swarm Activity. https://huggingface.biz/blog/security