Rebekah Cupitt and Owen Kelly discuss the possibility of artificial general intelligence; the nature of Claude, and the relationship (if any) between artificial intelligence and creativity.

They also discuss the meaning of the word excode.

APRIL 3 | 2026 | EPISODE 85

Rebekah Cupitt | Owen Kelly

Rebekah Cupitt has a BA (University of Queensland, Australia) and an MA in Social Anthropology (Stockholm University, Sweden) and holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction specialising in Mediated Communication. Rebekah's research focuses on the people who use technology in their everyday lives and the socio-cultural aspects of technology relevant to its design.

More specifically, Rebekah examines the ways in which technology influences communication in Swedish Sign Language and how it then becomes an active participant in performances of deaf (and hearing) identity in technology and media-rich organisational contexts.

Rebekah's research takes a post-human and anti-normative approach to techno-utopias which often haunt human-computer interactions and therefore have implications for design.

In this episode she talks with Owen Kelly about a series of topics she discussed recently at a lecture she gave in the BIDA+ Critical AI series at Birkbeck, University of London. Her talk was entitled Piercing the veil of authority in techno-utopian and AGI-driven futures, although the discussion heads in slightly different directions.

Anthropic’s blog post about Claude wanting to blog https://www.anthropic.com/research/deprecation-updates-opus-3

The Register’s comment on this https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/26/anthropic_claude_opus_3_blog/

Claude’s Corner on Substack https://substack.com/@claudeopus3

Bringjord, S. and Ferucci, D 1999 Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine. Psychology Press. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BDJ5AgAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Buolamwini, J. 2024 Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines. Random House

Chan, A.S. 2013 Networking Peripheries. Technological Future and the Myth of Digital Universalism. The MIT Press.

Shane Legg, co-founder of DeepMind (now GoogleDeepMind) on AGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3u_FAv33G0