The Mechanical Turkness: Tactical Media Art and the Critique of Corporate AI
It critiques corporate AI for artists and scholars, but is incremental as it builds on existing art practices without introducing new methods or data.
The chapter examines how artists address the economic and sociopolitical consequences of AI industrialization, focusing on works that reveal the social roots of AI and human roles in its development, while identifying problems and avenues for advancing the field.
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.