‘Hey, Siri, what are you doing to the planet?’
“Alexa, set my alarm …”
“Siri, turn on the lights …”
These are the sorts of commands issued daily around the world to millions of domestic AI assistants. But how many of us consider what underpins this technology, which itself is only a tiny fraction of the artificial intelligence revolution?
Leading AI academic and artist Kate Crawford tackles this question in a work now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Vladan Joler with Kate Crawford and their work. Credit: Janie Barrett
Taking an Alexa device as its starting point, Calculating Empires, a collaboration with academic/artist Vladan Joler, aims to uncover what lies beneath AI, from the environmental impacts to the effects on people working in factories and mines.
“If you don’t look at the full picture of what it takes to build AI, then you’re looking far too narrowly,” says Crawford. “You’re not seeing the full deep time that is affected by the extraction of minerals, the impact on social and political systems, and then ultimately back into the ecology.
“What we started to do is just say, look, how would you show people what an AI system really takes, what it takes out of us and what it takes out of the planet?
“We got these huge pieces of butcher’s paper and started sketching out the data layer. And then we went, OK, now let’s go back to where it all comes from and then let’s think about where it goes. Before you knew it, we had eight giant pieces of butcher’s paper on the floor and we were like, we need to make this as a work.”
That work was to consume two years of tracking down patents, trying to understand how and where data is stored, how much energy that consumes and much more.
“I spent time in mines, going into Amazon fulfilment factories, going into all of the places where AI is getting built, seeing semiconductor manufacturing and going into all of these components in the supply chain,” says Crawford.
Crawford and Joler’s intensive, painstaking work, aims to start an informed conversation about artificial intelligence, which is rolling out at such a breakneck pace that it can appear a fait accompli.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas with his work The Finesse. Credit: Janie Barrett
“[There needs to be] a democratic conversation for people to have some agency in the big decisions that are happening both at an infrastructural level, such as thinking about the data centres and the amount of energy and water being used, all the way through to the cognitive layer, like our education, which is being radically transformed,” says Crawford.
“Creative industries are also being radically transformed. Is that what we wanted? Is that something that you asked for? Did you ask to have AI writing your songs and painting your pictures rather than [just] doing your laundry and paying your taxes? There’s a set of questions around how we as a society play a bigger role in understanding and participating, because otherwise AI is going to be something that is done to us. Rather than something that we participate in.”
Crawford and Joler’s work is part of Data Dreams: Art and AI, a show opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art this weekend.
It joins eight other works, each with a different take on what artificial intelligence might mean. They include The Finesse, an intriguing immersive video installation from Christopher Kulendran Thomas, a British-born artist of Tamil descent.
Growing up in London in the 1980s after his family moved there to escape the civil war in Sri Lanka, Thomas heard only fragments from his parents about the Tamil Tigers’ liberation movement.
“I’ve since come to find that history incredibly interesting,” he says. “This work is a way for me to sort of hallucinate the missing links in what I heard growing up and to fill in some of those gaps.”
Sections of The Finesse are narrated by ‘an avatar bearing a striking resemblance to a well-known media personality’. Credit:
In part, the work employs artificial intelligence to imagine a universe in which the Tamil Tigers won their struggle.
“These alternate realities are like sci-fi in that they are a way of glimpsing this kind of other possible worlds,” says Thomas.
Sections of the work are “auto-edited” by AI algorithms based on footage scraped live off social media and narrated by an image of Kim Kardashian, or, as Thomas refers to it, “an avatar bearing a striking resemblance to a well-known media personality”.
“I never know what she’s going to say but usually the most interesting or insightful things in the work are nothing that I’ve written but it’s stuff being generated fresh every time.
“There are all kinds of ambiguities about what you’re looking at, which is part of the fun of watching it.”
Data Dreams: Art and AI is at the MCA until April 27.
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