Signs Taken for Wonders: AI, Art & the Matter of Race

AI shares with earlier socially transformative technologies a reliance on limiting models of the “human” that embed racialized metrics for human achievement, expression, and progress. Many of these fundamental mindsets about what constitutes humanity have become institutionally codified, continuing to mushroom in design practices and research development of devices, applications, and platforms despite the best efforts of many well-intentioned technologists, scholars, policy-makers, and industries. This essay argues why and how AI needs to be much more deeply integrated with the humanities and arts in order to contribute to human flourishing, particularly with regard to social justice. Informed by decolonial, disability, and gender critical frameworks, some AI artist-technologists of color challenge commercial imperatives of “personalization” and “frictionlessness,” representing race, ethnicity, and gender not as normative self-evident categories nor monetized data points, but as dynamic social processes always indexing political tensions and interests.