When the revolution comes, tell them it was craft: A sociopolitical critique of AI

The impact of AI on art and design - Original Research

Abstract

In this essay, I aim to explore artificial intelligence from a sociocultural and sociopolitical perspective within the context of visual culture. In “The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility” (1936), philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin observed that technological inventions such as photography and film, and the way in which an increasingly massified audience received these, threw into perspective undercurrents of changes in the sociopolitical fabric itself. Such observation and analysis of the drivers of change in the production and reception of art is, in Benjamin’s words, ‘useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art’ (Benjamin 2002:102). A Benjaminian approach to analysing AI enables a deeper sociopolitical critique that goes beyond ethical red flags such as nonconsensual data collection, ecological calamity, and the perpetuation of cultural bias. Lastly, I explore the status of craft as a possible revolutionary counter-practice in the face of cannibalistic and dehumanising aspects of AI with reference to Benjamin’s essay “Some remarks on folk art” (1929) and Tarkko Oksala and Tufan Orel’s essay “On the persistence of craft” (2022).