Between Autonomy and Agency: Art and Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Beginning with a historical and cultural contextualization of artificial intelligence, this talk will show that the creative capacities of AI are inextricably connected to the ways in which these technologies often disable and complicate effective human agency. The growing anxiety and fears about autonomous technologies and artificial intelligence not surprisingly centre on how ‘humans are not in control anymore’. The consequent emergence of regulatory regimes and legal safeguards that seek to contain and control the workings and effects of AI have ironically sought to reverse the historical trajectory of such technologies; namely, to return the human into the ‘automation loop’. Drawing on a range of artworks it will be shown that such artistic explorations of AI show us the limits of AI and ways of reimagining and acting to ethically restitute agency back to humans.