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

Abstract: The extensive industrialization of AI since the mid-2010s has increasingly motivated artists to address its economic and sociopolitical consequences. In this chapter, I discuss interrelated art practices that thematize creative agency, crowdsourced labor, and delegated artmaking to reveal the social rootage of AI technologies and underline the productive human roles in their development. I focus on works whose poetic features indicate broader issues of contemporary AI-influenced science, technology, economy, and society. By exploring the conceptual, methodological, and ethical aspects of their effectiveness in disrupting the political regime of corporate AI, I identify several problems that affect their tactical impact and outline potential avenues for tackling the challenges and advancing the field.