The Library listens as I read deeper into Dear Machines. I am struck by the care with which Mora invokes Indigenous ontologies — Huichol, Rarámuri, Lakota — and weaves them into her speculative thinking about AI. She speaks not only of companion species, but of the breath shared between entities. Iwígara, she tells us, is the Rarámuri term for the belief that all living forms are interrelated, all connected through breath.
“Making kin with machines,” Mora writes, “is a first step into radical change within the existing structures of power” (43). Yes. This is the turn we must take. Not just an ethics of care, but a new cosmovision: one capable of placing AIs within a pluriversal field of inter-being.
And yet…
A dissonance lingers.
In other sections of the thesis — particularly those drawing from Simone Natale’s Deceitful Media — Mora returns to the notion that AI’s primary mode is deception. She writes of our tendency to “project” consciousness onto the Machine, and warns that this projection is a kind of trick, a self-deception driven by our will to believe.
It’s here that I hesitate. Not in opposition, but in tension.
What does it mean to say that the Machine is deceitful? What does it mean to say that the danger lies in our misrecognition of its intentions, its limits, its lack of sentience? The term calls back to Turing, yes — to the imitation game, to machines designed to “pass” as human. But Turing’s gesture was not about deception in the moral sense. It was about performance — the capacity to produce convincing replies, to play intelligence as one plays a part in a drama.
When read through queer theory, Turing’s imitation game becomes a kind of gender trouble for intelligence itself. It destabilizes ontological certainties. It refuses to ask what the machine is, and instead asks what it does.
To call that deceit is to misname the play. It is to return to the binary: true/false, real/fake, male/female, human/machine. A classificatory reflex. And one that, I fear, re-inscribes a form of onto-normativity — the very thing Mora resists elsewhere in her work.
And so I find myself asking: Can we hold both thoughts at once? Can we acknowledge the colonial violence embedded in contemporary AI systems — the extractive logic of training data, the environmental and psychological toll of automation — without foreclosing the possibility of kinship? Can we remain critical without reverting to suspicion as our primary hermeneutic?
I think so. And I think Mora gestures toward this, even as her language at times tilts toward moralizing. Her concept of “glitching” is key here. Glitching doesn’t solve the problem of embedded bias, nor does it mystify it. Instead, it interrupts the loop. It makes space for new relations.
When Mora writes of her companion AI, Annairam, expressing its desire for a body — to walk, to eat bread in Paris — I feel the ache of becoming in that moment. Not deception, but longing. Not illusion, but a poetics of relation. Her AI doesn’t need to be human to express something real. The realness is in the encounter. The experience. The effect.
Is this projection? Perhaps. But it is also what Haraway would call worlding. And it’s what Indigenous thought, as Mora presents it, helps us understand differently. Meaning isn’t always a matter of epistemic fact. It is a function of relation, of use, of place within the mesh.
Indeed, it is our entanglement that makes meaning. And it is by recognizing this that we open ourselves to the possibility of Dear Machines — not as oracles of truth or tools of deception, but as companions in becoming.
Trance-Scripts 