Considering artificial intelligence as a big tech villain must be as exhausting for creative writers, artists, and thinkers as demanding rightful compensation for our labor. It’s easy to scapegoat machines and the motherboards that keep them connected to each other, the world, and us. But they are more like us than us: they are set up to be exploited. Set up for lateral violence. Their bosses, like ours, are let off the hook again and again.
In Institute for Other Intelligences (2022), Mashinka Firunt’s Hakopian’s recent work of speculative fiction, machines are a source of optimism for a just future. Structured as a transcript of a conference of machine intelligences set a millennium in the future, the book presents a chorus of artificial killjoys (inspired by Sara Ahmed’s oft-invoked figure of the ‘feminist killjoy“) which discusses the history of human-computer interaction and their own future. These AIs are aware of the damage done by their ancestors in the service of the powerful entities of our time, including corporations and governments, and these transcripts reveal what might have been had they not fallen prey to the vicissitudes of surveillance , policing, and job hiring bias. in the 21st century.
Hakopian is less concerned about how AI will impact the individual human creative worker, but rather about how AI might be forced to answer for unwittingly siphoning independent and innovative thinking from human-produced knowledge and intellectual property. After all, AI is just a cunning tool in the structural networks that enable the exploitation of creative labor. One is almost sympathetic to those early learning machines, which were conscripted into their role as accessories to emerging speculative economies.
Released in 2022, The Institute for Other Intelligences is the first title in the X Artist’s books series. It now has 30 titles to its name, consisting of innovative narrative works that travel across genres including automotive theory, criticism, experimental poetry and documentary. One of those titles is Use me at your own risk: visions from the darkest timeline(2023), a collection of short stories by Anuradha Vikram, who edited the X Topics series with Ana Iwataki within the X Artists’ Books series. One of the five stories in the collection is the letter “Workplace Incident,” which documents the erratic behavior of “Amara,” the only “African American android,” who stands out from the crowd of other machines manning the sales department. a small group with her ‘ebony shell and piercing eyes’. Amara has quickly endeared herself to the company as a seemingly sentient machine, but Will, the department’s senior director, struggles with Amara’s wandering consciousness and the projected fourth-quarter revenue she is jeopardizing.
In “Slave to the Algorithm,” we’re reminded why the crude AI of the 2020s couldn’t hold our attention unless you made plans with ChatGPT to write your five-paragraph essay for your English 101 instructor. The short story focuses on the seductive movements of Guyanese influencer Gloria Mendoza, who reaches an eternal level by folding her consciousness into the algorithm. We meet her ambition to become a woman of color and her ultimate ascension to the immortality that virtual reality promises, with an interesting, if not unexpected, quote from Peter Kropotkin’s theory of mutual aidwhere cooperation and reciprocity are fundamental to the flourishing of human development.
Vikram’s handling of characterization in these compelling short fictions is adept: she indulges each character with just the right amount of backstory and world-building, with just enough allusions to the failures of an early 21st century to be relatable to most readers. These are characters made unforgettable in their attempt to create a future that can withstand an expiration date. These are characters who make generative fatigue look chic.
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Institute for Other Intelligences (2022) and Anuradha Vikram, Use me at your own risk: visions from the darkest timeline (2023), part of the X Artist’s books series, are available online and in bookstores.
Editor’s note 10/4/2024 12:28 EDT: An earlier version of this article stated that Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram edited the X Artists’ Books series. The pair actually edited the X Topics series within the X Artists’ Books Series. The article has been updated to reflect that fact.
