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The Mechanical Turkness

tactical media art and the critique of corporate ai

Abstract

The extensive industrialization of artificial intelligence (AI) since the mid-2010s has increasingly motivated artists to address its economic and sociopolitical consequences. In this chapter, I discuss interrelated art practices that thematize creative agency, crowdsourced labor, and delegated artmaking to reveal the social rootage of AI technologies and underline the productive human roles in their development. I focus on works whose poetic features indicate broader issues of contemporary AI-influenced science, technology, economy, and society. By exploring the conceptual, methodological, and ethical aspects of their effectiveness in disrupting the political regime of corporate AI, I identify several problems that affect their tactical impact and outline potential avenues for tackling the challenges and advancing the field.

Ljubiša Bojić, Simona Žikić, Jörg Matthes, and Damian Trilling, eds. Navigating the Digital Age: An In-Depth Exploration into the Intersection of Modern Technologies and Societal Transformation, 509–539. Belgrade: Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. | PDF