Immediate obsolescence: Bataille, excess and AI

This paper outlines the multiple ways in which generative AI renders its users and their ways of seeing obsolete, foregrounding (as AI only can) what is already known or common. Obsolescence does not have to be a cause for regret if it can foster productive disengagement from the status-quo. Yet, in the context of generative AI the production of obsolescence threatens a curtailment of human possibility that extends even to the resource material, the vast textual datasets that AI ‘writes’ from. In response, the paper explores how obsolescence itself might be reframed and redeployed. Forms of ‘immediate obsolescence’ might be pursued as a limit point (acts would be attempted that are already defunct) in which human waste material (textual and literal) would be indulged against the forces of co-option and curtailment.