Rethinking ethics in the age of AI art

What if ethics wasn’t about ticking boxes, but about how we act, care and respond in the moment? In their new book Decentring Ethics: AI art as method (Open Humanities Press, 2025), Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn and Emilie K. Sunde explore how artists using AI are raising new questions about responsibility and creativity. The book challenges the idea of ethics as a fixed code, instead showing how it plays out in real practice.

In the following podcast recording with Vanessa and Jasmin, we discuss how the GLAM sector – galleries, libraries, archives and museums – navigates these ethical choices, and how artists and arts workers can help us imagine new ways forward.

Transcript

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Ana Tiquia
What if ethics wasn't a rigid code, but something lived, improvised in the moment, shaped by care, conversation and even the non-human world around us? Artificial Intelligence is reshaping how we create and connect. But inside galleries, libraries, archives and museums – the GLAM sector – AI brings a different kind of challenge. Here, curators, artists and cultural workers make ethical choices every day.In their new book, Decentering Ethics: AI Art as method, Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmine Pfefferkorn, and Emilie K. Sunde argue that artists can show us the way forward by treating AI not just as a tool, but as a method, a way of working with tension, care and possibility. We spoke to Vanessa and Jasmin about art, technology and the people in our cultural institutions who are reimagining what ethics can be.It's a conversation about AI, but it's also about us and the worlds we choose to build together. I'm Ana Tiquia, Head of Digital Strategy, Research and Insights at State Library Victoria, and you're listening to an SLV Lab Podcast, part of its Conversations series, where we discuss emerging technology, digital experimentation and library futures with artists, technologists and workers in the cultural sector.0:01:29 - 0:02:00
Vanessa Bartlett
How do we make decisions outside of the existing ethical frameworks? Because technology always moves much more quickly than the law. And much more quickly than, you know, any of the formal frameworks that are put in place by organisations. Vanessa Bartlett is an independent curator and interdisciplinary research leader. Drawing on her own lived experiences, she explores how medical and technical systems shape equity, ethics and social justice, particularly for disabled and chronically ill folk.0:02:00 - 0:02:33
Ana Tiquia
Her curated exhibitions exploring the psychosocial impacts of digital cultures have been seen at international art spaces such as FACT (the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) UNSW galleries and Furtherfield, and are featured in The Guardian, Creative Review and BBC Radio Four. She's edited two books for award winning academic publisher Liverpool University Press. She was McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication and Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law at University of Melbourne.0:02:33 - 0:03:01
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
We have these ancestors in the machines. All of this language that is used to train large language models is the collective wisdom, for better or for worse of our culture. And we can we do have agency in this space. Jasmine Pfefferkorn is a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She's currently researching the impact of generative technologies on museums practice.0:03:01 - 0:04:32
Ana Tiquia
She's an executive member of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, on the steering committee for CAIDE AAIDE, and the co-founder and co-director of the Research group CODED AESTHETICS. She holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne on Emergent Museum Practice and is the author of Museums as Assemblage, published by Routledge in 2023. Her interdisciplinary research spans museum studies, critical eye, visual culture, and digital humanities.The following conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. We acknowledge the traditional lands of all the Victorian Aboriginal clans and their cultural practices and knowledge systems, and would also like to acknowledge and pay our respects to any First Nations listeners joining us for this conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today.Thanks for having us. Thank you. It's a pretty special day. You're about to launch the Decentering Ethics: AI Art as Method. I just wanted to start with asking if we can talk about Decentring and why you feel it's important to decentre ethics, especially in the GLAM sector. So for us, decentring really comes from the fact that a lot of the conversation we have around ethics in the field of AI comes from a Western framework, and that's something that we feel is incredibly important to start to move away from, because we don't exist in just this singular, universal perspective.0:04:32 - 0:05:21
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
In fact, we exist in kind of a pluriversalism, right? There are so many different perspectives of the world to take into account, and that's true of the space of ethics as well. And I'd say for the GLAM sector, that becomes really important because it's not a public, a singular public that you're serving as the GLAM sector.It's publics, publics with multiple perspectives, who you themselves have pluriversalisms, and so do accommodate for an ethics, but also to have a lived ethics of that is to really open up to that multiplicity. Yeah. I think, the question that we began this book with was always, you know, what can practicing artists bring to a conversation about AI ethics, which is distinct from more traditional research approaches?0:05:21 - 0:07:01
Vanessa Bartlett
And, you know, that brought us to this conversation about the difference between hard ethics and soft ethics. So that is, you know, hard ethics – and this concept comes from a digital philosopher called Luciano Floridi – and he talks about hard ethics as the sort of formal government regulatory frameworks that are provided to help organisations and communities make decisions about ethics and ethical practices.And then he talks about soft ethics, which are the more kind of informal frameworks. And when we thought about what artists were doing in this space, I guess we felt that their contribution was very much around how do we make decisions outside of the existing ethical frameworks, because technology always moves much more quickly than the law and much more quickly than, you know, any of the, the formal frameworks that are put in place by organisations.So you have this idea of what is an ethics or an AI ethics in practice. And as somebody who worked in the GLAM sector, prior to being an academic, I know very much that that day-to-day on the ground, people are making ethical decisions through, you know, responding to situations, to problems as they come up, in organisations on the fly in discussion with their colleagues who might have different kinds of approaches or perspectives or agendas.And so I think this idea of decentring knowledge, decentring away from the formal, ethical, frameworks is really important for the GLAM sector because it's how people practice. I was really interested as well in the kind of, more-than-human ethics as well that you bring in. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and why it's relevant?0:07:01 - 0:08:05
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
Yeah, I think again, for the GLAM sector, it's so well placed to address and more-than-human ethics, because there is an existing culture of care around the material, and that includes the digital and the computational. And so coming with that culture of care to these various objects allows us to build kinship with materials. It allows us to express that care in various ways, develop a respectful, harmonious working relationship.Not all the time. Sometimes it can be combative, but sometimes that's caring as well. And so yeah, I think for the GLAM sector, that positionality of curation or collecting or you know, all of these practices that are really the everyday practices of the GLAM sector, as Vanessa was saying, allow us to build relationships with objects, with technology, with the more-than-human we live and work alongside every day.0:08:05 - 0:09:27
Vanessa Bartlett
Yeah, and I think there's a really excellent chapter in the book by visual artist Helen Knowles, who talks about the sort of the more-than-human in care practices. And, you know, I think there's also a collective statement at the end of the book which talks about how we situated our, I guess, our working practices within academic frameworks.And again, it's all about how knowledge is constructed in the moment. And those care practices, I think are, as Jasmin has said, you know, deeply foundational to the GLAM sector, not only in how we care for objects, but how we care for relationships as well. You know, and, as a curator who works, you know, does long durational collaborations with artists and works with a lot of with multiple stakeholders,I think relational practices are incredibly important in, in the, in the GLAM sector. I'd add in Aarati Akkapeddi's chapter as well. Aarati is an artist who creates handmade data sets, and in the book writes very eloquently about the intimacy that they have with their data as a result of scanning in individual photographs one by one, photographs that are both from their family albums, but also from the Tamil Star's archive.0:09:27 - 0:10:07
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
And so practices like that, I think really indicative of the kind of pushback that artists and cultural workers can have against that sort of big tech ideal of efficiency, of optimisation of, you know, move fast and break things. We instead can say, no, let's be patient, let's, you know, do things slowly and yeah, intimately. There's many different kind of regimes of value or practices that can exist around data and AI that you sort of see through artist practices that we might not see in the dominant narratives.0:10:07 - 0:10:55
Ana Tiquia
I really love that framing as well of collections practices being seen as more-than-human, as being seen as more than human-in-nature, which is a really lovely way to sort of talk about it. I was wondering if we could return to talking a little bit about the hard ethics and soft ethics within the GLAM context.At the moment, it's pretty fascinating to acknowledge that we're working within very loose regulatory frameworks, particularly around things such as generative AI, where we won't be working to national guidelines or, not so prescriptive principles, but definitely not working to actual legislation or any kind of strong regulatory measures. I was interested in your kind of exploration of soft ethics and what you see the artists doing in the soft ethics space, in their work with AI, in institutions.0:10:55 - 0:11:54
Vanessa Bartlett
So soft ethics is generally the sort of informal, regulatory practices or frameworks that people, communities and organisations put in place to sort of regulate themselves outside and sort of beyond the law. But I think, you know, what I see in artistic practice that it really has to offer is this sort of, embodied, intuitive responsiveness to the situation at hand, which I think is radically important when it comes to considering ethics.And one of the things that we talked about is the sort of the background of the philosophy of ethics, which tends to be very cerebral and based on kind of rational judgment. And I think we wanted to bring forward this idea that artists play with and work through embodiment and situated relationships, I'd say. I think another sort of layer that we can add to that idea of hard ethics and soft ethics is ethical0:11:54 - 0:13:23
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
'know what' and ethical 'know how', which was from - Vanessa, who was it? Varela? - Francesco Varela. Francesco. Varela and also taken up by other scholars like Barbara Boldt. So hard ethics, relates, in our view, to ethical know what. So that's really having that kind of formula of rules and regulations in front of you, that real top down.This is how to live well in the world. This is how to exercise ethical judgment versus ethical know how, which is more that realm of soft ethics because it's a bit more dynamic. And ethical know how is knowing from the ground up how to practice ethics. And you can only do that through living it right through interacting. And I think the big takeaway from that difference between ethical know what and ethical know how is that ethical know how is internalised.You can take that with you. You don't need then the formula. You know how to take ethical practice with you into other future scenarios. Yeah, I think, I'd also really like to mention a chapter by, visual art curator Dannielle-Maria Admiss, who talks about the idea of the portal. So this is this idea that we live in quite challenging times.0:13:23 - 0:14:52
Vanessa Bartlett
I mean, her chapter specifically relates to the issue of climate justice. And we live in, in times where it's quite challenging as an individual to make good decisions in relation to the climate and how we work and live in response to climate change. And she takes the idea of the portal as this moment in life when things might open up and as you know, a person might glimpse an opportunity to practice more ethically.And I think, you know, again, coming back to this idea of practice and grounding in practice, living ethically and embodying ethics is about those moments where the portal opens up, you know, and we can step through into a practice, a slightly more ethical approach, which may be limited. You know, we are all limited and bound as individuals, and we have sometimes limited agency.But it's about stepping through the portal when it presents itself. And sometimes those limitations come into effect as we encounter the institution as well, right? We've got a lot of chapters and a handful of chapters that deal with navigating institutional parameters. So things like, colleagues of ours at the University of Melbourne contributed a chapter that looks at the ideas of, consent, connection and creativity and how sometimes you, in order to dial up creativity, have to dial down consent and vice versa.0:14:52 - 0:15:31
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
We also have a chapter by the artist Xanthe Dobbie, who talks about their experiences of censorship and queer remix in their art. So there are some really interesting examples in the book as well, of how sometimes, even though, you know, these institutions are also wanting to be ethical 99% of the time, the kind of protocols of ethics that ethical know what can or the hard ethics can butt heads with the soft ethics and the ethical know how, because ethics is not something that can be a singular framework.0:15:31 - 0:17:04
Vanessa Bartlett
Yeah. And I think one of the things that we say in the introduction to the book, which is really important, is that we're not idealistic as well about what artists can bring to discussions about ethics, because artists have to become ethical and engage with ethics very often when they're interfacing with the institution. You know, the institution can at times sort of through, you know, no fault of its own, place limitations or constraints on the work of the artist as well.And, you know, there's also the question, do artists always have to be ethical, which is, you know, opens up a whole other sort of set of questions. So I think, yeah, Xanthe's chapter is really interesting because they talk about, you know, the different tensions and constraints that they inevitably face when they want to show their work because it's queer remix art and it's challenging, and it's got nude people in it.And, you know, that's a bit scary for institutions and. Yeah. So yeah. And the, it's not, not actually the nudity itself, which is ethically problematic for the institution, it's actually the source of the imagery because it's a pornographic image, scraped from the web. And there are concerns about, you know, who might actually be in that image.So, all of these nuances are emerging specifically around AI practices as well. I found that probably one of the most interesting things about your work, these kind of sites that seem both productive and antagonistic between artist and institutions and seeing them as sites of quite generative encounter as well. Probably for both parties. In any of the examples that you've researched in terms of these works.0:17:04 - 0:20:18
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
Or that you cover, are there ones where you've sort of seen benefits for both or very productive dialog emerge on the institutional side? In terms of productive dialog emerging, I would point to the work of Nora Al-Badry, who is an Iraqi-German artist who works in the space of cultural heritage, and uses computational, digital and computational technologies to, I suppose, reclaim cultural heritage for, you know, the kind of Iraq region and its surrounding areas.And one of the works that is written about in the book is a work called 'Babylonian Vision' from 2020. And in it, Nora Al-Badry has scraped the digitised collections of the five major Western museums of their neo Sumerian, Assyrian and Mesopotamian artifacts and run those through a generative adversarial network, which essentially uses two neural networks, trained on a corpus of data to then produce something that looks similar to, but different from, any of that previous imagery.And so with that work, Nora's creating these new artifacts, right? A process that she calls technoheritage. So it's kind of this reclamation of these artifacts because a lot of them, from, you know, taken from source communities that they shouldn't have been taken from by these museums. And the other kind of complicating factor of it that I find really productive and interesting is that when Nora went to get permission to scrape this data, she couldn't get it because they wanted her to fill out individual forms for every single artifact.This is a corpus of 10,000 artifacts. That wasn't going to happen. So she scraped them. She hasn't named... I think actually, that's not true. She has named the museums that she scraped from, but just not, you know, formally. And what that does is it kind of protects her from the kind of legal ramifications of being, of scraping that data because the museum can't tell exactly whether that new artifact was trained on their source material or not, which is a very interesting upending of what we traditionally sort of associate with the issues of artists and generative AI when it comes to things like copyright.But the reason that it's so productive is because it's a form of institutional critique. It is something that, you know, then does get displayed in institutions and becomes a talking point that forces institutions to reckon with their imperialist histories. Such a powerful example, especially thinking about that as an act of reverse plundering and highlighting the colonial context of all the material that exists in so many imperialist collections in this book.0:20:18 - 0:20:40
Ana Tiquia
I guess one of the things I really wanted to chat to you about was how you've really championed both artists and their practices in this space as providing very distinct ways for us to think with and through AI ethics. And you've also proposed this idea of AI art as method. And I was wondering if you could talk us through a little bit more about what this method looks like and why it's important.0:20:40 - 0:23:01
Vanessa Bartlett
Yeah, I mean, we were just talking about methods earlier. I mean, I think if you're an academic, you tend to have an expectation that method is repeatable. You know, we talk about research methods as protocols and processes that produce repeatable results. And, you know, if you're a scientist particularly and in a way, you know, we've had a lot of tension around this word method because I think actually a lot of artists eschew method or fight against it.And, you know, most artists have their own distinctive kind of methods and processes that are not repeatable and are responsive to situations, you know, rather than, as we say in the book, decentred ethics is a practice, not a template, you know? So I'd like to think that we have situated ourselves within a really productive tension in talking about, you know, art as method and AI art as method.I think that term also comes from, you know, our challenges. And, you know, I'll speak personally for a moment. My particular challenges as a creative practitioner, navigating interdisciplinary research in academia and kind of wanting to put forward and champion artistic work as research, because I believe in the value of artists in, you know, unraveling, I don't want to say new knowledge, but in, you know, in pointing at things and saying, hey, look, this is important.You know, I think artists can do that in really valuable ways. But often, you know, the academy still has some trouble recognising what is, you know, if it's not repeatable and definable, then what is its value? So I think, you know, defining AI art as method is, yeah, a little bit of a moment of trying to advocate, I think, for the value of artists within research.While acknowledging that many artists may not want to be, you know, they may not want to be method people or recognised as such. But, you know, the whole book is about these kind of productive tensions in how we do things, which I think is, you know, the most positive and productive way that you can look at a problem.0:23:01 - 0:23:39
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
It's also an attempt for us to really push back against, mainstream conflation of AI art with AI generated images. You know, we're not talking here about the kind of AI slop, that is propelling, like, fascism right now, that we're seeing, you know, Trump putting on his X account, where we're talking about really intuitive, embodied careful practices, that have a lot of thought and a lot of conceptual richness, to them.0:23:40 - 0:24:07
Vanessa Bartlett
Yeah. And I think going back to Aarati Akkapeddi's chapter, you know, this idea of slowly piecing together your own dataset for an artwork, you know, it's a beautiful, slow method, you know, but it's not methodological or kind of conservative in the way that some methods are. We think of them in, in the Academy. But it's, it's method and process and it's how ethics comes into being in her work.0:24:07 - 0:25:24
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
Yeah. The artist Hito Steyrl talks about her practice of working with the computational as wayfinding and latent space, which I love. And, and one of the artists who we have a conversation with in the book, Beverly Hood does this as well, by engaging with Adobe Firefly in this really iterative, interesting way. Adobe Firefly, of course, you know, having these community boards that are full of artists who complain about the kind of, content moderation that is happening when they're trying to engage with the platform and Bev Hood comes along and kind of starts to iterate using prose and to generate the images that she wanted togenerate, which, you know, this is for an artwork called 'Mother', which is a photo film from 2024. She wanted to generate images of pregnant stomachs showing skin, but of course the North American model that is Adobe Firefly was just giving her these very demure smock-covered images of women that very lovingly placing their hands on their smocked stomachs.0:25:24 - 0:26:10
Block Field
And so, Bev started, using different sort of prose, phrases, words to wayfind to find that soft embedded spot in the model and ended up opening it with the word "fecund", which had all of this ripe, lush, bursting imagery. And yeah, that was a really the way that she kind of found her way through the parameters of that model.0:26:10 - 0:26:39
Ana Tiquia
You mentioned earlier about the tensions and so many of the projects that you talk about and the artist practices and these engaging these tensions, whether through technology or coming up against institutional, norms, would you say it's that these tensions that the ethics emerges? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think one of the phrases that we batted around was that, you know, artists are purveyors of mystery rather than the bringers of mastery.0:26:39 - 0:28:01
Vanessa Bartlett
So, you know, not trying to have... to master knowledge, as is the case in some more traditional fields, but actually work with the contradictions and the not knowing and the unknowing as a productive space. I think that's how we tried to situate ourselves. And I think, you know, we, we have, a kind of collective statement at the back of the book, which talks again about how we navigated tensions in our own approach to making the book and how things like emotional and social labour kind of produce, contradictions and challenges in our own enacting of decentred ethics as we were making and doing the work.So, I think, you know, not only were we interested in productive tension, but I think we lived it as well in how we, you know, navigated the institutions that we were dealing with and, and how we navigated relationships in making the book. One of the other things that really came through very strongly for me in that navigation was the way in which artists will privilege cultural protocols over, at times, computational protocols, at times governmental protocols.0:28:01 - 0:28:35
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
And again, it's because they've got that that lived experience that's very on the ground. And as Vanessa said, I completely agree. You know, we don't want to make the claim that artists somehow are or should be more ethical than an everyday person. That's certainly not what we're saying here. But I will say the artist that we've dealt with are privileging cultural protocols over, sometimes the hard ethics that we're told we should follow.0:28:35 - 0:29:23
Ana Tiquia
I was really interested in your writing on Nora Al-Badry. I think you described her practices as ethical hacking, and it made me think a little bit about some reflections on being in the institution and in institutional operating systems. This idea that, for instance, we're here in an institution that's a colonial institution. We have a collection, as mentioned before, that was collected largely in the colonial period.And we're getting very close to our 170th birthday. But thinking about the kind of, the ways in which institutions, are very effective at doing what they've always done and thinking about that within an operating system kind of perspective. I was curious to hear from you as to what you sort of thought might be ethical hacking practices in this kind of context.0:29:23 - 0:31:34
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
And based on the research and what you've done with artists. I mean, I work for a large colonial institution as well. A lot of us do, particularly on the land that we're located. So I think one of the things that I've learned from the artists around this idea of ethical hacking is also related to that kind of way that we've positioned method with our instrumentalisation.So I think a lot of the time within institutions, we are required to kind of quantify, instrumentalise do all of those things, but you can often sneak things, below and under that, in really interesting ways that can again prioritise a particular ethical stance. I know I do that in my workplace, along with a lot of other educators, who will prioritise students over policy at times.In the same way that you can prioritise the relationship with your colleagues over certain policies. It happens. I'm reticent and hesitant to say it, but, you know, I'm hopeful as well that if we highlight the care practices that we live and inhabit, that, you know, one of the amazing things that is also a horrific thing about the institution is how quick they are to subsume critique.And sometimes in that subsumation, the institution also changes so that's the standpoint I take. Yeah, I mean, I, I keep drawing attention to this collective statement at the end of the book. It's actually my favorite part. I'm a really big advocate for, I guess, personalising cultural labour or kind of speaking the truth about cultural labour and the toll that it takes on the body and on individuals.0:31:34 - 0:32:57
Vanessa Bartlett
I think, you know, we, the cultural field, you know, whether you work in an arts organisation or in, in academia, it's a very competitive environment. And we're all trying to put, our game face on and put our best face forward or our best foot forward. Sorry, but I think, you know, the realities behind the scenes can be quite different.And I feel very privileged to have had the opportunities that I have had in, in making this book. And it's been a very joyful experience to work with other early career researchers on the projects. You know, we cobbled together money. We worked late at night on Zoom, you know, across two sides of the planet, and we use the word survival, I think, in the collective statement, you know, like we're trying to survive within imperfect organisations and imperfect institutions.And perhaps that isn't spoken about enough. And so, you know, we were a little bit, mindful of practices of what might be called sort of ethics-washing in academia or academics, speaking about ethics and researching ethics, but perhaps not able, because of the constraints placed on them by the institution to be ethical, to show up in the world in ethical ways and yeah, so I think that collective statement is a way of trying to voice some of our own methods and processes for hacking in how we made this work happen.0:32:57 - 0:33:25
Ana Tiquia
I wanted to ask you something that was grounded in the research in this space that you've been in, what is sticky or tricky or challenging or exciting for you that you see emerging in this space. While we think about emergence, I'll quickly throw in just another point on that last question. Which is one of the refreshing things about the volume is that there's no claim by anyone towards neutrality.0:33:26 - 0:33:52
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
And I think that that's something that institutions also kind of need to get behind. You know, we know that they're not neutral. They're not neutral institutions. And so that's really something that they can learn from the book. How can you speak from a standpoint of strength? But also grace, around ethical issues? Yeah. And be transparent while acknowledging privilege and struggle at the same time.0:33:52 - 0:34:44
Vanessa Bartlett
You know, I mean, I think, looking to the future, I would like to see this book making an impact on how the contribution of artistic research is seen in the academy. You know, I would like AI art as method for all its sort of inherent failings and tensions, as we've discussed to, yeah, take on a life of its own.I think in terms of how we acknowledge artists and research spaces. And I would like to see artists properly remunerated for the work that they do in academic contexts, because they're not always given the recognition. I would like to see autistic outcomes given the same gravitas as research papers. So yeah, I would like to see this book make a change in terms of how artists are recognised as contributing to knowledge.0:34:45 - 0:37:15
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
I would hope that it allows people to settle into the uncomfortable ambiguities that is the space of ethics. I think one of the sort of timely things right now is in the wake of the Productivity Commission here, you have a lot of rightful concern around the way in which, AI or text and data mining hasn't been included as part of copyright under this commission, which, you know, of course, a lot of creatives are concerned about, we've always had that kind of push and pull between things being open source and open access in order to stimulate more creative output.And, as Vanessa was saying, remunerating our artists to make sure our creatives to make sure that they can continue to keep creating. And so there's 1,000,001 different ways in which you're looking at one situation in the space of technology and AI today that has all of these ethical conundrums. And ultimately that's what ethics is, right? It's a site of productive tension that we need to explore.And there's always going to be inherent ambiguity in it. And so, my hope is that this book allows people to gather up some tools to kind of sit with that ambiguity and really face it head on. And the other thing that I'd really hope comes from this book is that people develop a relationship with technologies that they use in slightly different ways, that do have that more patient, more kin-based approach.One of the chapters in the book by Sean Cubitt, talks about how we have these ancestors in the machines. You know, all of this language that is used to train large language models is the collective wisdom, for better or for worse, of our culture. And we do have agency in this space and, and my hope is that every person who reads this book feels like they're able to reclaim some of that agency in how they interact with these technologies that seem at times quite obscure. I think, as well, just to add, one of the things that we've done, both for the field of AI art, but I hope0:37:15 - 0:38:14
Vanessa Bartlett
for kind of, more general, understandings of what AI art is, is I think we've really expanded the framework. You know, it's not just images made with MidJourney, it is AI as a social and technological imaginary. You know, I think we have to look at AI through that lens now. You know, it's more than a technology. It's a social and cultural and material imaginary.And I think, you know, that's the sort of expanded definition of AI that we want to invite, rather than some of the reductive, kind of ethical conversations that that unfold in the media, around these very narrow ideas about what, what AI art is. We need to underscore the importance of cultural institutions here. Cultural institutions are sites of translation for this sort of stuff between artists, creatives, governments, publics.0:38:14 - 0:38:51
Jasmin Pfefferkorn
You know, they're really this interstitial space where so much comes together and there's a real passion in the people who work for cultural institutions to serve their publics and to create opportunities for encounter, for engagement, for understanding and for nuance. And so I think wanted to uphold that as much as we critique the cultural institution. It comes from a place of, of love and of hope for the potential of the institution as well.0:38:51 - 0:39:17
Vanessa Bartlett
Yeah. And I think that's another site, yet another site of productive tension within the place. Our kind of personal relationships, personal and cultural relationships to cultural institutions as people who intersect with cultural institutions every day and love them and have some critical points to make as well. We always need good critical friends. Thank you both so much.0:39:17 - 0:39:45
Ana Tiquia
It's been such a privilege to have you both in the studio today, and to have you come in and talk about your new book. It's been wonderful to hear about this emerging or ever emerging field of AI art. So Decentering Ethics: AI Artist Method is edited by Vanessa Bartlett, Jasmin Pfefferkorn, and Emilie K. Sunde, and it's available through Open Humanities Press and part of their Data Browser book series.Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you.