AI Through the Ages: Art Exhibition Explores Wonders and Dangers of Artificial Intelligence in Paris

Exploring AI Through Art

• 💡 The exhibition "The World Through AI" at Paris's Musée du Jeu de Paume uses art to explore the profound and often invisible transformations brought about by AI technologies.
• 🎯 It features works from about 40 international artists over the last decade, reacting to AI's increasing presence in society and its political and epistemological implications.
• 🔑 The goal is to understand what it means to live, see, hear, understand, and imagine a world increasingly infiltrated by AI.

Materiality and Environmental Impact of AI

• 🌍 The exhibition highlights the profound materiality and environmental dimension of AI, countering the notion that digital technologies are dematerialized.
• ⚡ AI technologies require massive quantities of energy and natural resources, having a significant environmental impact.
• 🔬 Sculptures by Julian Sharier, made from fused materials from data centers and computers, exemplify this by returning these components to their geological state.

AI, Memory, and Possible Futures

• 🧠 Gregory Shatonski's work, "The Fourth Memory," uses AI models to process vast quantities of cultural objects and memory from the internet.
• 💾 It imagines a post-human extinction scenario where AI models continue to process and develop their own variations of human culture from stored data.
• 🎭 Another work by Shatonski explores possible lives he could have lived, using AI to generate variations of himself, tapping into AI's latent spaces as repositories of past possibilities or future prefigurations.

Tracing the Genealogy of AI

• 📈 "Calculating Empires" is a 24-meter diagram tracking the genealogical lines leading to AI today, starting from the Renaissance in 1500.
• 📜 It shows how inventions like perspective and the printing press began to treat texts and images as calculable entities, digitizable and processable.
• 🔍 The authors, Kate Crawford and Vlad Yoler, aim to illustrate how we arrived at the current state of AI and to help understand what might come next.

Distinguishing AI Types and Societal Impact

• 🎭 The exhibition distinguishes between analytical AI (e.g., facial recognition) and generative AI (e.g., creative image generation), with half the exhibition dedicated to each.
• ⚠️ The show addresses the dangers of AI, including job suppression, delegation of thinking processes, and environmental/political risks, aiming to foster better understanding and control.
• 🤝 It emphasizes the profoundly human dimension of AI technologies, highlighting human decisions, choices, and the crucial role of millions of often underpaid workers, particularly in the Global South, who train and clean AI models.