Short abstract

This paper proposes reading synthesis and generativity as instances of a politics of plausibility centered on excess, deception, experimentation and affect. As a governing rationality, plausibility operates a reduction of the possible while performatively shifting the very category of the plausible.

Long abstract

This presentation centers the logics of (digital) synthesis across domains to interrogate the politics of generativity shaping contemporary artificial intelligence (AI). It traces a genealogy of digital synthesis, situating synthetic data and their generative excess (Amoore et al. 2024; Jacobsen 2023) within a longer history of biological emergence, evolution, heredity, modeling, and synthetic biology. Building on this lineage, I propose that synthesis, as a governing rationality, instantiates a novel form of future-oriented governance—one that no longer merely anticipates and manages risks, whether probable or possible (Amoore 2013), but instead seeks to intervene on reality and shift normativities through the sustained (re-)introduction and (re-)formulation of the plausible. Drawing on examples spanning synthetic datasets, AI-generated genomes, AI-assisted drug "discovery" and species "de-extinction", this presentation explores the onto-epistemic politics of the plausible: plausible objects and beings populate landscapes of the real, recursively shaping the very category of plausibility. I offer a notion of politics of plausibility to probe new ways to address epistemic and political questions tied to digital (and biological) synthesis by foregrounding and characterizing aspects of the plausible, such as excess, potential deception, experimentation and affective engagement. Examining synthesis, generativity and contemporary forms of AI through the lens of plausibility surfaces a novel locus of power: namely, the reduction of the possible to the plausible, and the continuous reshaping of plausibility itself through the experimental synthesis of countless plausible ontologies.