Affordance of Generative AI: For a posthuman tool analysis

This paper re-examines the concept of affordance within the context of generative AI, challenging the recent embodiment framework of human-computer interaction. Drawing on Gibson’s ecological psychology and Actor-Network Theory, it proposes a ‘fold diagram’ to illustrate how generative AI fundamentally alters the relationship between users and digital environments. Unlike previous tools requiring user skill for specific outcomes, generative AIs, exemplified by Compton’s generative art toy Idle Hands, procedural content generation, and LLM-based AI chatbots, respond meaningfully even to unintentional actions or underdeveloped queries, facilitating a new trade-off where control is ceded for increased power. The paper argues that affordances are no longer opportunities for action discovered by the user, but rather the machine’s capacity to flesh out predicted user interests. This shift is viewed through the lens of a radical symmetry between human and AI agency, where both actively fold the digital web to create intra-active niches. Ultimately, the paper presents a critical theory of HCI, asserting that software capitalism leverages generative AI to continuously re-world the web, preserving and exploiting pre-individuated user interests for profit.