Fareed Barakaفريد بركة

Merit

Description

Merit is an artwork made in a conventional way — colored pencils on white paper — then given to a generative AI tool to explore how AI can help extend the image into a motion picture, creating a scene out of a single image. The goal of doing this is to rethink AI as a tool: a very sophisticated one, yet a tool nonetheless, much like other digital tools. The narrative of AI as a ghost-in-the-machine entity is culturally dependent — evidently so, when seeing how different cultures place AI within their own culture. The long-lived legacy of dystopian sci-fi and the Frankensteinian obsession with creating a synthetic human has led to this eerie conception of AI. Once one thinks of AI as a product of science rather than a product of nature, one comes to see AI as it truly is: a tool.