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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 notion of plausibility to interrogate the politics of generativity shaping contemporary artificial intelligence (AI). It argues that generative AI's production of novel, politically consequential outputs is no longer confined to the visual register that has dominated critical engagements with synthetic media. Building on scholarship theorizing genAI's excess over its training data (Amoore et al. 2024; Halpern & Mitchell 2023; Jacobsen 2024), I propose that plausibility, qualitatively distinct from probability and from possibility (Amoore 2013), operates as a synthetic, world-making principle: not merely a cognitive judgment but an ontological logic that authorizes generative excess as a component of social, political, and scientific worlds. Drawing on three case studies spanning increasingly generative registers (from generative polling agents to AI-generated genomes), this presentation traces plausibility's technical and political operations from summarization to full synthetic extrapolation. I identify three interlocking dimensions of an emerging politics of generativity: novelty, understood as the active generation, rather than mere anticipation, of the unprecedented; plausibility itself as a technical and cultural logic of coherence with the shifting doxa of both a model and a society; and functionality, the test through which plausible outputs are rendered usable within the systems they enter. Examining synthesis, generativity, and contemporary AI through the lens of plausibility surfaces a novel locus of power: the displacement of open-ended possibility by a controlled, steerable plausibility, and the continuous reshaping of plausibility itself through the sustained (re-)introduction of ever more plausible objects, beings, and worlds.