The idea of creative machines is a hot topic right now, but popular understanding of art made with artificial intelligence is still poor. Discussion of AI art is typically siloed off by genre. When a bot generates sonnets, those outputs are judged by the standards of literature. When AI is used to generate imagery, the outputs are invariably perceived within a tradition of image-making that includes painting and photography. Missing from the conversation so far is a unified perception of creative machines—whether they generate text or images or music—as works of art in themselves, ones that perform for us, much the way puppets do. In this session we will move past the tired question “Can machines be creative?” to identify common traits among generative algorithms across many categories of media production, and arrive at a framework for understanding artificial intelligence systems in terms of, well, puppetry.
I'll just talk more if there are few session participants and folks are too shy to contribute to the discussion. This can be as participatory as folks want it to be.
We're hoping that many efforts and discussions will continue after Mozfest. Share any ideas you already have for how to continue the work from your session.:Would love to invite session participants to a following "art hack," to co-create a project that in some way makes vivid the idea of machines as puppets.
What is the goal and/or outcome of your session?:Help people understand that control of AI systems lies squarely in human hands, and when algorithms run people over in the form of glitchy self-driving cars, or make racist inferences about someone’s criminality based on poorly conceived data, it is a consequence of human thoughtlessness in their design and implementation. Too much anthropomorphism of algorithms erodes people's agency, making it seem that bad social outcomes are the result of some sort of machine 'cognition'. The analogy of algorithms as puppets helps make intelligible who is in control - the puppet masters, the people who make them. I hope this way of thinking encourages an emphasis on human accountability.
Kat Mustatea is a playwright and technologist. She is curator of EdgeCut, a live performance series that explores our complex relationship to the digital, and a member of NEW INC.