The Mechanical Turkness: Tactical Media Art and the Critique of Corporate AI

TL;DR

This paper examines how tactical media art critiques corporate AI by highlighting human labor and agency, revealing social issues, and challenging AI's political and economic dominance through creative practices.

Contribution

It analyzes art practices that expose the social roots of AI and discusses their effectiveness in disrupting corporate AI's political regime.

Findings

Art reveals social and political issues of AI

Creative agency challenges corporate AI dominance

Potential strategies for enhancing tactical impact

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.