Thinking about artificial intelligence as a villain of technology must be also tiring for creative writers, artists and thinkers as demanding compensation for our work. It is easy for the scapegoats and motherboards that keep them attached to each other, the world and us. But they are more like us than otherwise – set up to be exploited. Set up for lateral violence. Their bosses, like ours, are kept away, many and many times.
In Institute of other intelligences (2022), Mashinka Firuts Hakopian Work of speculative fiction, machines are a source of optimism for a fair future. Structured as a transcription of a conference of machines intelligence which take place a millennium in the future, the book presents an artificial Killjoys choir (inspired by the often invoked figure of Sara Ahmed du “Killjoy feminist») Discuss the history of human-computer interaction as well as their own future. These AIs are aware of the damage that their ancestors have triggered in the service of the powerful entities of our time, including societies and governments, and these transcriptions presented what could have fallen into the 21st century.
Hakopian is not so concerned about the way in which AI will affect the individual human creative worker as much as the way she could be forced to account for independent and innovative thinking to siphon knowledge and intellectual property produced by man. AI, after all, is only a different tool cunning in structural networks that make the exploitation of creative work possible. You are almost sympathetic to these early learning machines, enlisted because they were in their role of accessories to emerge speculative economies.
Released in 2022, The Institute for other intelligences is the first title of The artists' books series. He now has 20 titles to his credit with 10 others in progress, made up of innovative narrative works that travel through genres, notably AutoTheory, criticism, experimental poetry and documentary. One of these titles is Use me at your own risk: Visions of the darkest chronology(2023), a collection of news from Anuradha Vikram, which edited the X Topics series within the series of artists X with Ana Iwataki. One of the five stories included in the collection is the epistolary “work incident”, which documents the erratic behavior of “Amara”, the only “Afro-American Android”, which stands out from the crowd of other machines that endow the sales department with a small business with its “ebony envelope and permanent eyes”. Amara quickly became attached to the company as an apparently sensitive machine, but the main director of the department is struggling with the wandering conscience of Amara and the projected revenues which she endangers for the fourth quarter.
In “Slave to the algorithm”, we remember why the Brute AI of the 2020s could not hold our attention unless you are compressed with Chatgpt for author your test at five paragraphs for your English instructor 101. The news focuses on the attractive inflections of the Guyanese influencer Gloria Mendoza, who reaches an eternal plane by folding his conscience in the algorithm. We meet his female ambition and his ultimate ascent in immortality that virtual reality promises, with an interesting, if not unexpected quote, of Peter Kropotkin's mutual aid theorywhich receives cooperation and reciprocity as fundamental for the prosperity of human development.
The management of the characterization of Vikram in these captivating short fictions is a fan – it engages in each character with just the right amount of background and construction of the world with just enough allusions to failures from the beginning of the 21st century to be recognizable by most readers. They are characters made unforgettable in their attempt to create a future resistant to an expiration date. These are characters who make generative fatigue chic.
Mashinka Firuts Hakopian, Institute of other intelligences (2022) and Anuradha Vikram, Use me at your own risk: Visions of the darkest chronology (2023), part of The artists' books The series are available for online purchase and in bookstores.
Editor's note 10/4/2024 12:28 PM EDT: A previous version of this article indicated that Anu Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram published the series of artist books X. The pair actually published the X topical series within the X Books Artists 'Books' Books. The article has been updated to reflect this fact.
Editor's note 11/7/2024 17:20 PM EDT: A previous version of this article indicated that the series of artist books X published 30 books. The article has been modified to reflect that it has published 20 titles and has 10 others in progress.
