Pluriverses, Many-Worlds, and Fictioning Pedagogies

This chapter engages deeply LLMs and GenAI by considering these through fictioning and world-building practices. Introducing the concept of “echo,” we first engage with multiple poetic and performance-based pedagogic forms for developing new approaches to education that go right to the heart of LLMs and GenAI in and for learning. Student exercises are given, and what emerges at the end is a strange conversation with an LLM where through prompts made through fictioning processes, it decides to reveal itself by fictioning itself a body. This body was not generated with any specific prompts, so what we are presented with is an astonishing insight into how ChatGPT drew on its own programming language and biases to “embody” itself. We discuss exactly how and why it decided to frame itself as a glowing guru and what this shows us more broadly about LLMs, the stranglehold of linguistic forms, and how embodied pedagogic practices are key for a postdigital 21st century class.