The Mechanical Turkness: Tactical Media Art and the Critique of Corporate AI

Since its largely obscure beginnings in the 1970s, AI art has expanded, gained visibility, and attained sociocultural relevance since the second half of the 2010s (Audry, 2021). It has benefited from the accelerating affordance of multilayered subsymbolic machine learning (ML) architectures such as Deep Learning, AI’s increasing sociopolitical impact, and the art market’s integration with the crypto economy. Contemporary AI art includes diverse creative pathways informed by functions, applications, and consequences of modern ML systems (Cetinić and She, 2022; Grba, 2022a, 3-17).