How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want

This briefing is intended to help people with a responsibility for AI projects understand the considerations around their direct negative environmental impact arising from AI.

Rethink Design – A vocabulary for designing with AI addresses the question of how designers can engage with AI. The book presents 17 terms that were developed through inquiries into, and explorations of, designing and living with massively interconnected, potentially autonomous, and seemingly intelligent technologies. Unlike older technologies, these do not wait for human action but engage the world proactively, making decisions, communicating, and sharing data at speeds and scales that challenge comprehension. As such they destabilise and undermine boundaries, often with disregard to moral imperatives, and reconfigure not only the material world but also our relationships with it, with each other, and with ourselves. The terms are organised into 5 sections, each oriented by a key question: How will we craft inclusive human-algorithm relations?, How will we design AI systems that benefit people and the planet?, How will we create equitable socio-economic models in the digital society?, How will we enable public deliberation on data and algorithms?, and How will we prototype responsible data-driven design practices? Taken together the terms provide a sense-making instrument, a map for navigating flexibly a complex, emergent terrain. Reflecting and responding to the dynamism of the field, the book aims to be agile and accessible, offering not the final word but a brief, critical and creative introduction – a set of complementary vistas, entry points, and insights.

spicing up the rational realm with a dose of intuition and wonder.

You probably have seen many posts about ChatGPT offering search now to premium users. While it's framed as 'search,' it's an entirely different beast… | 15 comments on LinkedIn

A series of intertwined feedback loops that unfold from several interrelated briefs, which are designed to facilitate intellectual and practical exploration.

Start by recognizing that every technical system represents a set of choices.

When I first used Dall-E in January 2021, I input some text, I think it was a resin chair inspired by a cactus (I had Gaetano Pesce on my mind).

A text about reading AI images as infographics.

Creative Pattern Recognition is a hybrid publication that explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative practice. It covers a wide range of topics such as the role of AI in art and design, addressing the impact and potential of AI on creative practice. It also highlights the opportunities and challenges presented by AI tools, the evolution of the field, and the potential for AI to enhance human creativity and explore uncharted artistic territories. Furthermore, it explores the ethical considerations surrounding AI, including the impact on creative jobs and the importance of demystifying AI to address societal concerns. Through interviews, reflections and analytical pieces, Creative Pattern Recognition provides a comprehensive, situated overview of the current landscape of AI in creative practice and formulates an answer to the question of why creatives should engage with AI and how to approach it.

Grief-laden vitriol directed at AI fails to help us understand paths to better futures that are neither utopian nor dystopian, but open to radically weird possibilities.

An urgent intervention rooted in the militant liberation struggles of the most oppressed within the arena of global computational racial capitalism.

Within the last decade a large corpus of work in HCI as well as the commercial design practice has focused on systematically addressing questions of ethics, values and moral considerations embedded in the design of digital technology. Recent critiques have highlighted that these efforts fall short of actual transformative impact. We use the sociological concept of imaginaries to argue that value and ethics work needs to be considered within the larger context of socially shared visions of a desirable future and outline how existing sociotechnical imaginaries pre-frame contexts in which value work is deployed. We demonstrate that imaginaries provide the language and conceptual framework necessary to address underlying ethical worldviews before ethics driven design methods and toolkits can be successfully employed. Finally we suggest how to engage imaginaries to facilitate a broader shift towards a more politically sensitive approach to designerly value work.

I’ve been struggling to articulate this idea, and maybe the problem is that it’s actually kind of simple once you put it out there, and there’s really no good reason to unpack a whole case for it once you put the thought on paper.

Our data-centric way of seeing the world isn't serving us well. Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier argue that we need new socio-technical systems that leave room for the inherent messiness of reality.

Video, slides, and transcript from my talk on the challenges of designing with language models

I summarise a few papers I have recently read on what LLMs can and cannot do. One (not surprising) finding is that LLMs skill profile is very different from humans. Which is good, means that human+…

In January 2021, we launched ‘A New AI Lexicon:’ a call for contributions to generate alternate narratives, positionalities, and understandings to the better known and widely circulated ways of talking about AI.

A Stanford professor’s dismantling of Silicon Valley’s intellectual origins, by Adrian Daub. Published by FSG Originals & Logic.

As a critical researcher of AI myself and experience as entrepreneur I know how hard it is to navigate the trade offs between surviving in the market and being…

EDITED BY THAO PHAN, JAKE GOLDENFEIN, DECLAN KUCH & MONIQUE MANN

On artist Zach Blas's wide-ranging practice that scrutinizes the relationship between digital technologies and the cultures and politics that animate them.Za...

Are algorithms biased? Rodrigo Ochigame traces newfound interest in this question back to the early attempts to formalize notions of fair decision making.

It’s no accident — the intertwining of religion and technology is centuries old.