Lost in the Logistical Funhouse: Speculative Design as Synthetic Media Enterprise

TL;DR

This paper explores how synthetic media, generated by AI tools, can be understood as logistical media by creating a simulated logistics design business using GPT-based models, revealing the intertwined nature of media and logistics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel practice-based approach to conceptualize synthetic media as logistical media through experiments with ChatFOS, a GPT-based logistics design bot, and explores their implications.

Findings

Synthetic media can serve as logistical media in operational contexts.

AI-generated media elements can be assembled into complex logistical simulations.

The experiments reveal the intertwined evolution of media and logistics in contemporary computation.

Abstract

From the deployment of chatbots as procurement negotiators by corporations such as Walmart to autonomous agents providing 'differentiated chat' for managing overbooked flights, synthetic media are making the world of logistics their 'natural' habitat. Here the coordination of commodities, parts and labour design the problems and produce the training sets from which 'solutions' can be synthesised. But to what extent might synthetic media, surfacing via proto-platforms such as MidJourney and OpenAI and apps such as Eleven Labs and D:ID, be understood as logistical media? This paper details synthetic media experiments with 'ChatFOS', a GPT-based bot tasked with developing a logistics design business. Using its prompt-generated media outputs, we assemble a simulation and parody of AI's emerging functionalities within logistical worlds. In the process, and with clunky 'human-in-the-loop' stitching, we illustrate how large language models become media routers or switches, governing production of image prompts, website code, promotional copy, and investor pitch scenarios. Together these elements become links chained together in media ensembles such as the corporate website or the promotional video, fuelling the fictive logistics visualisation company we have 'founded'. The processes and methods of producing speculative scenarios via ChatFOS lead us to consider how synthetic media might be re-positioned as logistical media. Our experiments probe the ways in which the media of logistics and the logistics of media are increasingly enfolded. We ask: what can a (practice-based) articulation of this double-becoming of logistics and synthetic mediality tell us about the politics and aesthetics of contemporary computation and capital?