AI Myths and Mythos with Eryk Salvaggio

Eryk Salvaggio articulates myths animating AI design, illustrates the nature of creativity and generated media, and artfully reframes the discourse on GenAI and art.   

Eryk joined Kimberly to discuss myths and metaphors in GenAI design; the illusion of control; if AI saves time and what for; not relying on futuristic AI to solve problems; the fallacy of scale; the dehumanizing narrative of human equivalence; positive biases toward AI; why asking ‘is the machine creative’ misses the mark; creative expression and meaning making; what AI generated art represents; distinguishing archives from datasets; curation as an act of care; representation and context in generated media; the Orwellian view of mass surveillance as anonymity; complicity and critique of GenAI tools; abstraction and noise; and what we aren’t doing when we use GenAI. 

Eryk Salvaggio is a new media artist, Visiting Professor in Humanities, Computing and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and an Emerging Technology Research Advisor at the Siegel Family Endowment. Eryk is also a researcher on the AI Pedagogies Project at Harvard University’s metaLab and lecturer on Responsible AI at Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering.  

Addition Resources:  

Cybernetic Forests:  mail.cyberneticforests.com 

The Age of Noise: https://mail.cyberneticforests.com/the-age-of-noise/ 

Challenging the Myths of Generative AI: https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/ 

A transcript of this episode is here.