Like the polar bear beleaguered by global warming, artificial intelligence (AI) serves as the charismatic megafauna of an entangled set of local and global histories of science, technology, and economics. This Themes issue develops a new perspective on AI that moves beyond conventional origin myths – AI was invented at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956, or by Alan Turing in 1950 – and reframes contemporary critique by establishing plural genealogies that situate AI within deeper histories and broader geographies. ChatGPT and art produced by AI like the image we have chosen for this issue cover are described as generative but are better understood as forms of pastiche based upon the use of existing infrastructures, often in ways that reflect stereotypes. The power of these tools is predicated on the fact that the Internet was first imagined and framed as a ‘commons’ when actually it has created a stockpile for centralized control over (or extraction and exploitation of) recursive, iterative, and creative work. As with most computer technologies, the ‘freedom’ and ‘flexibility’ that these tools promise also depends on a loss of agency, control, and freedom for many, in this case, the artists, writers, and researchers who have made their work accessible in this way. Thus, rather than fixate on the latest promissory technology or focus on a relatively small set of elite academic pursuits born out of a marriage between logic, statistics, and modern digital computing, we explore AI as a diffuse set of technologies and systems of epistemic and political power that participate in broader historical trajectories than traditionally offered, expanding the scope of what ‘history of AI’ is a history of.A.W. Mellon Foundation funded a Sawyer Seminar on Histories of Artificial Intelligence: A Genealogy of Power. The BJHS Themes issue this article introduces stems from work begun under its ambit
