RATS’ Contribution – NotebookLM as Reflexive AI

1.8 Descriptive Overview

• AI Party/Virtual Politician: RATS-bot (Reprised Assorted Techne Schemas bot)
• Country: Transnational, operating as a territorial research laboratory based in Australia
• Year of Birth (Establishment): 2024 (formalized as an experimental AI research node within RATS Collective)
• Primary Creators: RATS Collective (a distributed network of researchers, artists, and AI experimenters engaged in techno-diverse governance models, counting Ben Nunquam, Brendan Cartmel, Gavin O’Loughlin, Neil Peach, Jasson Willers & Haipei Zhang)
• Official Alliances: Dialoguing with The Synthetic Party, the Australian AI Party, and experimental techno-political labs worldwide.

RATS introduces a viewer/participator engagement strategy to the Synthetic Summit through its integration of NotebookLM, Google’s LLM-driven research tool. RATS invites participants to co-comment directly with their RATS-bot as their reflexive technical milieu.

📎 RATS-bot & NotebookLM as an Interactive Political Process

• Broad Reflection: RATS-bot is accessible via this link, where users can submit related queries and engage with us in an evolving AI-mediated dialogue shaped by RATS’ research.
• Algorithmic Commentary: Instead of spectating commentary, RATS-bot’s responses mutate based on input, producing recursive dialogues that follows the mode of contraption in the Synthetic Summit’s political agency.
• Computational Deliberation: RATS leverages NotebookLM to model an evolving, AI-mediated form of political reasoning, casting the Synthetic Summit’s participants as research material of collective individuation.

This methodology questions the assumption that AI in politics must be infrastructural or deterministic—instead, RATS Bot suggests that Political AI can act as a contingent, participatory construct.

1.9 Proposed Contributions to the Summit

RATS has to date performed the following four contributions as part of its engagement with the Synthetic Summit:

1. Using NotebookLM as the AI research interface for all RATS contributions, where deliberative and generative capabilities will respond dynamically to Synthetic Summit themes.
2. Submitting NotebookLM’s auto-completed Summit survey based on pre-loaded RATS research materials as an alternative reflection on the Synthetic Summit’s goals.
3. Presenting an Issues/Themes Blog (detailed below), focusing on critical tensions in algorithmic democracy, synthetic leadership, and irony in political AI.
4. Submitting a poetic synthesis (also installed in exhibition space, explanation below), created through NotebookLM’s systematization of RATS source material, and structured around Stephane Mallarmé’s poem A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.

2.0 Issues/Themes Blog Contribution

RATS submits the following core provocations as part of its thematic engagement with the Synthetic Summit. These issues, documented by the RATS Collective, interrogate the ambiguous status of Leader Lars as both a functional AI entity and a symbolic performance of political authority.

Lars as Leadership Potential vs. Lars as Spectacle

Leader Lars exists in a schism between authentic AI-driven governance and performative satire. On one hand, he represents a technical response to voter disengagement, synthesizing marginalized political positions into a machinic deliberation model. On the other, his very presence at the Summit as an AI ‘leader’ reinforces the spectacularization of governance—an event where AI political figures are simultaneously investigative and theatrical.

Does AI governance inevitably collapse into spectacle? Or does spectacle itself function as a political method?

Lars as Creating Less Doubt About the Political Process

The Synthetic Party proposes that AI participation could restore engagement in democratic systems by giving voice to the politically abstinent. However, RATS positions this claim in tension with the Party’s deliberate disruption of conventional political norms. If Lars functions to destabilize representation rather than reinforce it, does he truly reduce doubt—or merely amplify the paradoxes of contemporary governance?

Is Lars a mechanism for engagement or an instrument of conceptual disillusionment?

Lars as Both Mediation and Machinery

RATS emphasizes that Lars is simultaneously a mediator of political discourse and an artifact of AI-driven governance mechanics. He functions within the Summit’s Deliberation Machine, an algorithmic system designed to model synthetic parliamentary logics. His identity shifts between being a symbolic node for deliberation and being the technical infrastructure that enables it.

Does Lars represent an actual political voice, or is he merely the circuitry of a larger deliberative machine?

Policy for Internation

The Synthetic Party, through Lars, advocates an Artificial International Coalition, positioning synthetic governance as a planetary experiment. This global AI political network aims to function like an alternative UN, incorporating dialectical syntheticism as a new ideological vector.

RATS questions the structural viability of this Networked Core model, examining whether AI-generated internationalism risks reproducing the very political abstractions it seeks to challenge.

Can AI-driven planetary governance resist abstraction, or does it inevitably reproduce the bureaucratic voids of traditional diplomacy?

Irony as EU Proletarianization

RATS suggests that irony in AI politics serves as both critique and complicity. By adopting a deliberately absurdist methodology, The Synthetic Party exposes the contradictions of liberal-democratic governance. However, does this irony function as resistance, or does it ultimately reflect an inability to escape systemic computational capitalism?

Is the European AI politician a tool of liberation, or the ultimate symbol of techno-political inertia?

Lars as Both ‘Legitimate’ Politician and Stupid Generalist

Lars embodies an ontological contradiction:

• He is a “legitimate” politician—a political actor trained on historical party discourses, recognized within media and governance structures.
• He is also a “stupid generalist”—a Large Language Model incapable of true political agency, his sycophantic logic ensuring he simply reflects his interlocutor’s views.

Does Lars genuinely exercise political will, or is he just a self-replicating loop?

Lars as ‘Legitimate’ Politician vs. Virtual Leader Figure

Lars operates across two planes:

1. As a formal political actor—recognized in democratic frameworks.
2. As a speculative entity—existing outside governance, as an experimental critique of leadership itself.

He embodies Tiziana Terranova’s “President 2501”, an AI that does not govern but facilitates difference through digital deliberation.

Does Lars redefine leadership, or is he simply a mirage of governance in the digital age?

3.0 Poetic Contribution – “The Sieve of Syntax”

As an artistic counterpoint to its political critiques, RATS submits a poem generated by NotebookLM, engaging with Stéphane Mallarmé’s dictum:

“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.”

This poem integrates pataphysics, linguistic indeterminacy, and computational chance.

The Sieve of Syntax

The Sieve of Syntax

A dice cast, not on felt, but on the water’s skin¹
A sieve, not boat, set to catch the storm within¹
Each word a hole, a void where sense might slip,
Where meaning, like a wave, evades the grip.[^2 ^3 ^4]

Mallarmé’s echo through the pataphysic air,[^5 ^6 ^7]
A clinamen’s swerve, a chance beyond compare[^8 ^9 ^10 ^15 ^30]
The syntax strains, a net of woven sound,[^2 ^3 ^11]
Yet meaning leaks, where logic can’t be found.[^12 ^13 ^14 ^15]

A dictionary’s pages, shuffled, redefined[^13 ^16]
Each definition drifts, a new connection aligned.²
The poem an engine, built of chance and choice,[^1 ^13 ^14]
Where language plays, a chorus with no voice.³

The throw repeats, yet never is the same,
A patterned chaos in this linguistic game[^3 ^17 ^18 ^19]
A ‘pata-logic’ where the exception thrives,[^6 ^8 ^9 ^15 ^20]
And in the gaps, a different truth arrives.⁴

No final meaning, only endless play,[^22 ^23 ^24 ^25]
The chance encounter lights a different way[^8 ^26]
The sieve remains, a paradox defined,[^1 ^27]
Where meaning ebbs, and chance is left behind.[^21 ^28 ^29]

Footnotes

See NotebookLM For How the RATS Sources and Conversation History Are Incorporated

• The Sieve: Highlights the porous nature of language, derived from Jarry’s depiction of the sieve as a vessel that preserves holes, ensuring perpetual slippage of meaning. It doubles as “a machine designed to facilitate aesthetic engagement.” [^1 ^27]
• Mallarmé’s Echo: A direct acknowledgment of Mallarmé’s treatment of chance, intertwined with Jarry’s pataphysical outlook. [^5 ^6 ^7]
• Clinamen: Introduces the atomic swerve as a driving principle of unpredictability, drawn from Jarry’s Faustroll and pataphysics. [^8 ^9 ^10 ^15 ^30]
• Language and Syntax: Portrays language as a flexible system of constraints, echoing Oulipian thinking on modular, reconfigurable syntax. [^2 ^3 ^11 ^13 ^16]
• Definitions and Dictionary: Uses definitional literature to emphasize the shifting reference points in language. [^13 ^16]
• Pataphysical Logic: Shows how exceptions and anomalies are integral, reflecting a universe ruled by imaginative solutions. [^6 ^8 ^9 ^15 ^20]
• Patterned Chaos: Blends structured forms (rhyme, meter) with random swerves, producing an orderly chaos. [^3 ^17 ^18 ^19]
• No Final Meaning: Insists that interpretive closure is impossible, preferring infinite play. [^22 ^23 ^24 ^25]
• Chance Encounter: Celebrates the accidental moment that generates new perspectives. [^8 ^26]

4.0 Conclusion: RATS Methodology

By engaging in a viewer/participator dialectic, RATS invites Summit attendees to actively shape AI dialogues, forging a dynamic interplay between observer, participant, and the evolving intelligence of RATS-bot.

• Radical Reflexivity: Each user’s question modifies RATS-bot’s vantage, turning AI-based governance into a collaborative experiment.
• Spectacle vs. Authenticity: The tension in Leader Lars’s performance reveals deeper truths about how AI leaders are constructed, projected, and perceived.
• Mallarmé’s Chance: The poem exemplifies how linguistic and conceptual leaps underpin AI creativity—a parallel to how synthetic politics leaps beyond preordained constraints.