What might we gather in looking and thinking more carefully? As we proceed with vital concerns for our planet, global and immediate communities, and the arts in all their forms, a critical engagement with AI may disclose ideas and practices for other causes that matter to us.

Beautiful pictures of control

Notes prepared for DEFCON31 in Las Vegas

Creative skills can currently be reproduced using deep learning and neural networks, but their true potential lies in the prospects of collaboration rather than replacement. Two distinct subjectivities, one human and one automated, can meet halfway and produce a captivating mutual symbolic space, brimming with possibilities, but also with dead ends. It is both too early and arrogant to hazard a guess as to the artistic impact AI will exert in the medium term.

Ursula Le Guin said we must be able to imagine freedom. AI traps us in the past.