The ETAC-2025 and STS Italia panels very much focused on the aspects of performativity around AI, tied to the Performing AI research project, which just started recently at Human-IST.

Dr. Jascha Bareis presented on the hype around Chat-GPT, investigating the various rhetoric motives staged by media and the American tech scene in the Silicon Valley. The upcoming discussion reflected the question how chatbots, based on large-language-models, could become so prominent - even though they have been around for so long. Are the hopes and massive speculative investment into chatbots tied to longtermist dreams of achieving General Artificial Intelligence? Is this speculative money not better invested somewhere else? Who profits from the media attention around AI?

The discussion showed that the chatbot hype drives on an overall societal dynamic triggered by strategic agents (hypers) - but is also carried by other domains which contributied to its take off (media frenzy, followership, financial investors, political opportunism…).