[Air-L] Troubling AI: a call for screenshots

[Joanna Zylinska]

Dear All,

A group of us from King's College London, Sciences Po and the Public Data Lab
are working on this collective project on visually screenshotting the
weirdness of AI. Please see the call below. We hope you will consider sending
us something – and help us spread the word.

Best,

Joanna Zylinska / Tommy Shaffer Shane / Axel Meunier / Jonathan W. Y. Gray

**************************************************************

troubling AI: a call for screenshots 📸

   How can screenshots trouble our understanding of AI?

   This "call for screenshots" invites you to explore this question by
   sharing a screenshot that you have created, or that someone has shared
   with you, of an interaction with AI that you find troubling, with a
   short statement on your interpretation of the image and circumstances
   of how you got it.

   The screenshot is perhaps one of today’s most familiar and accessible
   modes of data capture. With regard to Al, screenshots can capture
   moments when situational, temporary and emergent aspects of
   interactions are foregrounded over behavioural patterning. They also
   have a ‘social life’: we share them with each other with various social
   and political intentions and commitments.

   Screenshots have accordingly become a prominent method for documenting
   and sharing AI’s injustices and other AI troubles – from [1]researchers
   studying racist search results to [2]customers capturing swearing
   chatbots, from [3]artists exploring algorithmic culture to [4]social
   media users publicising bias.

   With this call, we are aiming to build a collective picture of AI’s
   weirdness, strangeness and uncanniness, and how screenshotting can open
   up possibilities for collectivising troubles and concerns about AI.

   This call invites screenshots of interactions with AI inspired by these
   examples and inquiries, accompanied by a few words about what is
   troubling for you about those interactions. You are invited to
   interpret this call in your own way: we want to know what you perceive
   to be a ‘troubling’ screenshot and why.

   Please send us mobile phone screenshots, laptop or desktop screen
   captures, or other forms of grabbing content from a screen, including
   videos or other types of screen recordings, through the form below
   (which can also be found [5]here) by 15th November 2024.

   Your images will be featured in an online publication and workshop
   (with your permission and appropriate credit), co-organised by the
   [6]Digital Futures Institute's [7]Centre for Digital Culture and
   [8]Centre for Attention Studies at King's College London, the
   [9]médialab at Sciences Po, Paris and the [10]Public Data Lab.



--
Joanna Zylinska
Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice
Director (Interim) of the [11]Centre for Attention Studies
King's College London
Department of Digital Humanities

NEW BOOK: [12]The Perception Machine: Our Photographic Future between the Eye an
d AI (MIT Press, open access)

NEW ARTICLE: [13]Diffused Seeing: The Epistemological Challenge of Generative AI
 (Media Theory, open access)

[14]Website
[15]IG research notebook

References

   1. https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/
   2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-68025677
   3. https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/prtscn-the-lazy-art-of-screenshot/
   4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231215360
   5. https://troubling-ai.glitch.me/
   6. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/digital-futures
   7. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/cdc
   8. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/centre-attention-studies
   9. https://medialab.sciencespo.fr/
  10. https://publicdatalab.org/
  11. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/centre-attention-studies
  12. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546836/the-perception-machine/
  13. https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/1075/684
  14. http://www.joannazylinska.net/
  15. https://www.instagram.com/joanna.zylinska/