Lures of Engagement: An Outlook on Tactical AI Art

TL;DR

This paper examines tactical AI art's poetic, expressive, and ethical dimensions, highlighting its role in critiquing AI's societal impacts and fostering socially responsible artistic expression.

Contribution

It introduces new perspectives on tactical AI art's poetic and ethical features, emphasizing its critique of AI science and technology across sociocultural, existential, and political themes.

Findings

Tactical AI art offers insights into AI-influenced society.

It demonstrates potential for socially responsible computational arts.

The paper outlines future challenges and directions for the field.

Abstract

This paper aims to diversify the existing critical discourse by introducing new perspectives for the poetic, expressive, and ethical features of tactical media art that involves artificial intelligence (AI). It explores diverse approaches of AI artists and their effectiveness in critiquing the epistemic, phenomenological, and political aspects of AI science and technology. Focusing on the three representative thematic areas - sociocultural, existential, and political - it discusses the works that exemplify poetic complexity and manifest the ambiguities indicative of a broader milieu of contemporary art, culture, economy, and society. It shows that tactical AI art provides important insights into the AI-influenced world, with the potential to direct computational arts toward a socially responsible and epistemologically relevant expressive stratum. The closing sections summarize the major issues of tactical AI art and outline possible directions to tackle the challenges and advance the field.