Who Designs the Loop? Anthropology and the Cybernetics of Human–AI Relations

This introduction to the Human Organization special issue on anthropology and AI asks what happens when anthropologists build, use, teach, regulate, and deploy AI, and what forms of power, imagination, and collaboration emerge from those entanglements. Across healthcare, law, and social scientific inquiry, the contributors converge on a single assertion: a relational dynamic between humans and AI is reshaping both parties. To make sense of that dynamic, the introduction returns to cybernetics, a tradition anthropology helped shape at its founding and has largely moved past. It describes human-AI relations as a loop, a recursive circuit running from anthropologist to system to institution to consequence and back, and argues that large language models have made cybernetics newly actionable because such systems can be steered in real time through natural language. The relations taking shape unfold in two phases: the conversational loop we are collectively navigating now, and a dialogical loop, in Bakhtin’s sense, toward which designers should actively steer these systems so that a multiplicity of voices is sustained rather than collapsed into a single authoritative one. The question the issue leaves open is who designs the loop, under what conditions, through which infrastructures, and toward whose goals.