A moodboard for AI
Can we change what AI looks like?
A while ago, I wrote a short piece on how, since AI has been taking over representations of illustrators in the media, illustrators should take over the representations of AI. So this week, in lieu of a written essay, I’m sending you a visual essay, in the shape of a moodboard.
While generative machine learning models have created a horizon of uncertainty for illustrators, and the companies operating them have unilaterally decided that creative work should be “improved” and made more efficient and less costly. In that scenario, illustrators are systematically framed as passive actors of this fate, waiting for an inevitable sentence. Embrace AI or perish, they say.
I suggest that illustrators have a specific power to claim as their own : that of creating representations. We’ve seen many blueish robots and countless ethereal digital creatures used as metaphors for machine learning and its impact on social life. Yet, machine learning is first and foremost applied statistic, human labour, and material resources, and it’s time that these aspect become part of the visual resource we use to visualize it.
Illustrators are the little workers behind how most things look like, and the visual language the rest of the population uses to visualize an issue often stems from the visual labour of illustrators, the concepts they articulate and the aesthetics they use. This means that by slightly shifting how we represent AI in the articles we’re hire to illustrate, we might slowly shift its public representations and open the way for more critical engagement with it. What if instead of blueish, futuristic tones, AI illustrations were using the pinks, greens and yellows from lithium mines used to power computers, or the muddy greys of data centres consuming millions of gallons of water? What if instead of abstract robots AI was personified by the global south workers annotating data, or the obscure spreadsheets of datasets?
Using another technology of decontextualization and objectification of illustrators’ work, the moodboard, I propose here a growing repertoire of inspirations for illustrators and art directors to draw from when representing machine learning becomes necessary in their work (I will continue to add images to it as an ongoing practice). This project echoes other initiatives directed at a wider audience like Philipp Schmitt’s Blueprint For Intelligence or the Better Images for AI project, but is specifically meant as a working tools for commercial artists.
This project is also a way to ask how the moodboard could work as a tool of resistance within the creative industry. The ubiquitous format is often part of a complicated relationship between clients and illustrators but is also widely used across the industry. So maybe because of this pre-existing power of the moodboard in the industry, it’s the perfect tool to create new paradigms of representations from the ground up.
I hope this project prompts a critical engagement with the power of illustration and the systems of power in which it is embedded and gives visual artists a repertoire of options that might challenge the already sedimented —but not unshakable— representations of AI.
Soak in the colours, the compositions, the subjects, the tones of these images, how does that change the way you might approach making an image about AI?
