design/motion/illustration
BETTER IMAGES OF AI
Illustrations developed for the AI4Media, Better Images of AI and AIxDESIGN open call to re-imagine together a better visual language for AI.
The goal of this project is to add new images to the public discourse so we can begin to use a more representative visual language for AI. The images developed were published as free-to-use stock images in the Better Images of AI library, as an effort to avoid perpetuating unhelpful myths about AI.
This triptych illustration set is an effort to visually situate AI beyond its sleek interfaces. The images showcase the entanglement of the disproportionate amount of natural resources, infrastructure, precarious and invisible labour behind AI, intertwined with power, profit and control in ways that reinforce structures of colonial domination.
Understanding the complexity of this mesh is essential not only to the understanding of AI itself, but to any debate regarding socio-environmental issues and possible futures on the planet.
The pieces features corporate power and profit sustained through exploitation, control and domination; the unsustainable extraction of mineral resources and exploitation of labour; and the user as a Chimera, visual metaphor suggested by Kate Crawford in which the “end-user” also provides (often unknowingly) valuable feedback, personal data and performs other invisible labour.