Human Noise, AI Filters: "Mr. Watson, Come Here."

Remarks on AI, Noise, and Creative Misuse for the Artificial Intelligence & Contemporary Creation conference, 24 May 2025 at the Jeu de Paume, Paris. 

A Personalized Ecology of AI

I'm three events into this tour talking about AI, and there's a question about the environment every time. What's the environmental impact of AI? In London, the question was a bit more pointed: How do I justify using AI as an artist, knowing the

Machines Cannot Feel or Think, but Humans Can, and Ought To

My new piece in Tech Policy Press is up, and it’s about the recent re-emergence of very silly chatter about whether AI “experiences the world” and therefore ought to have something akin to human rights. In the piece, I argue that they don’t need them. Here’s how

What Does It Mean to ‘use’ Generative AI?

Are pro and anti AI camps talking about the same thing when they say “useful”?

Possible Noise

A walk-through of the NCM's "Signal to Noise," a recently opened exhibition curated by Eryk Salvaggio, Joel Stern and Emily Siddons in Melbourne, that examines how artists have worked with noisy channels.

Signal to Noise (and Back Again)

Thoughts on noise, for the opening of “Signal to Noise” at the National Communication Museum in Melbourne.

Signal to Noise

Signal to Noise explores how artists work with, challenge, or complicate the relationship between signals and noise—disruptions, glitches or interference—in communication technologies and the messages they send.

Unsorted Depths

Unsorted Depths visualizes the archive as a cultural formation but also charts the field of memory against the backdrop of noise.

Future Fatigue: How Hype has Replaced Hope in the 21st Century

Gaining traction in the bleakest depths of 2020, Generative AI offered something more than just a tech product. It proposed a way of reimagining the future.

Nixon Called

Over at Tech Policy Press, I wrote about the government commission that lead to the creation of the 1974 Privacy Act, and how an expanding AI state puts the values of privacy from government surveillance at risk. The Privacy Act was created as a response to the growing presence of

What's the point of AGI?

It's been a busy few weeks, but I'm on a panel for the latest podcast of Tech Policy Press' "Sunday Show" alongside Borhane Blili-Hamelin and Margaret Mitchell to discuss a paper we co-authored – with a slew of additional authors – called "Stop Treating

Einstein Gazing at the Water

New work inspired by the history of diffusion and pollen.

Anatomy of an AI Coup

Elon Musk and DOGE's AI plans are not at all about efficiency, but about centralizing power to a small group of technical elites. A sample:

A Fork in the Road

AI is an excuse that allows those with power to operate at a distance from those whom their power touches.

spawning

Are Other AIs Possible?

We are seeing a generation of tools built without critically rethinking the purposes they are meant to serve or their role in the broader world. Could we do it differently?

The Ugliest Thing San Francisco Ever Built

I have a new article in Tech Policy Press about infrastructure, AI, urban renewal projects and other public works efforts that ended up creating social and physical burdens due to overreach. Here's how it starts: A day after his inauguration, President Donald Trump was joined in the White

A Culture Inside

On David Lynch, AI, and the Myth of Automated Interiority My closest real-life encounter with David Lynch was getting into a Lyft that had just dropped him off at the premiere of Twin Peaks: The Return. A friend and I had planned a trip to Snoqualmie, WA to go to

barthes

Data Prior to Language

If the author is dead, why isn't the LLM?

Dance Like You Don't Have a Body

When Disembodied Systems Want You to Move Note: The following video contains images of AI-generated bodies which some have found deeply un-nerving. If that's not your bag, don't click. In my early 30s I came to realize I had lived through severe bouts of depersonalization growing

It's Interesting Because

On NotebookLM, Fauxthority & Science Fiction 💡Design is storytelling meant to orient people to strange new tech by anchoring them in familiar terms. In that sense, it is a kind of science fiction. Whenever I talk positively about Gen AI, it means going very narrow, at the exclusion of a

Things I Did in 2024

Writing, Talks & Miscellanea A collection of writing, art and sounds I've worked on this year. Writing I've written quite a few pieces for Tech Policy Press this year. The Original Sin of Generative AI Should images of child abuse circulated online be commercialized? If we

Things I Read in 2024

A Partial List of Writing on Generative AI There has been some great critical writing about Generative AI this year. This is a long post with many quotations that tries to give a snapshot of what people – or at least I – was thinking about in 2024. I've broken

Slop Infrastructures 5 & 6

AI Populism and Slop as Symptom 💡This week was an experiment in multi-part publishing. Slop Infrastructures was shared in three parts, this is the third. You can read part one and two here, and parts three and four here. PART FIVE SPARKLE WITHOUT LIFTING A FINGER "Now, I must

Slop Infrastructures 3 & 4

Weaponized Slop If the purpose of a system is what it does, then the purpose of AI infrastructure is the production of AI slop. 💡This week, I'm trying something new. I'll be e-mailing smaller sections of a single piece, Slop Infrastructures, each day. This includes part