How Does AI Shape Our Understanding of Humanity?

AI forces us to confront some of the most fundamental questions about intelligence, creativity, and what it means to be human. Alan Turing’s empiricist approach to intelligence bypassed the need for rigid definitions, instead focusing on what machines can do and how they behave. This perspective invites a shift from essence to action, reframing intelligence as a dynamic and performative process.

Ted Chiang’s metaphor of AI as a “blurry JPEG of the web” underscores the limitations of these systems, which reflect not just data but the biases and assumptions embedded within it. AI generates outputs shaped by the values of its creators and the constraints of its training data, raising ethical questions about representation, equity, and power.

Reflecting on this, I ask: How can artists critically engage with AI to reveal its limitations and potentials? How do we use AI not only as a creative tool but as a medium for questioning the systems that shape it? This engagement demands a multidisciplinary approach, one that balances technical understanding with ethical inquiry and creative exploration. Through this lens, AI becomes a site for reimagining the intersections of technology, society, and humanity.