Mutant in the mirror: Queer becomings with AI

This paper contributes to scholarly discourse on design and AI by using queerness as a theoretical grounding to explore potentialities for design to interface with and imagine artificial intelligence (AI) differently. The paper does so by reporting on an autotheoretical experiment in which I pose the questions: What if we understood AI as queer, a kind of mutant, in a state of becoming; a dynamic, relational, nonbinary gender variant? How then might AI show up in and act on the world (with us humans) differently? The experiment uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to unsettle how AI is understood today and to allow for new AI propositions to take root. The work provides a glimpse into forms of design refusal that might illuminate designers to cultural computability and self-determination when designing with AI systems.