Material Agency of a Large Language Model

AI isn’t magic ✨ 🧚‍♀️ —it’s a material industry. There's growing debate about the agency of LLMs, AI agents, and agentic AI. In my article “The Material Agency of a Large Language Model” in the journal "Digital Society", I examine the material conditions of LLMs, their effects on the environment, the materializing effects on our bodies, and how their outputs materialize in the world. I refer to New Materialism and Actor Network Theory.

Puzio, A. The Material Agency of a Large Language Model. Digit. Soc. 4, 73 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44206-025-00225-3

(or, in case you don't have access: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/396558924_The_Material_Agency_of_a_Large_Language_Model )

I developed this research during my time in the ESDiT Research Programme and at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge.