Since September 2021, we have produced several publications related to the environmental impact of AI arts. This post collects and summarises our key advances in the domain.

On the Environmental Impact of AI Art(s)

A wide variety of creative practitioners are currently exploring the use of Ai in their work processes, for instance in poetry, music, performance, and visual arts. In this paper, we discuss the rela- tionship between Ai and sustainability in general but focus on the relationship between the emerging area of Ai art and sustainability in particular. We highlight the importance of pursuing research concerning the sustainability of Ai art and take initial steps towards understanding how Ai art practices may influence how we save or waste resources. Developed through our online fieldwork by analyzing the environmental impact of three specific cases of Ai artworks, we provide a conceptual approach that can be used to map the environmental sustainability of Ai art. With this paper as a basis, we hope to elicit awareness among scientific and artistic communities about the environmental sustainability of Ai art.

Link to the paper: https://computingwithinlimits.org/2022/papers/limits22-final-Jaaskelainen.pdf

Exploring More-than-Human Caring in Creative-Ai Interactions

Ai technologies are increasingly used by artists and creatives, and they as any other (technological) artefacts are embedded with the values and practices part of their historical development. These, for example, include desensitized embodied orientations of being in the world, involving practices such as disregard, abuse, and exploitation of non-human (e.g. the climate) and human (e.g. gender and racialization in relation to power). Our relation to the world and how technologies get designed are formed by our socio-cultural practices, values and norms – such as the predominant human-centered value sets (with embedded imbalances in favouring some humans more than others) and the Euro-modern perception that assumes a divide between human culture and nonhuman nature [18, 19, 27]. Sustaining practices of embedding such values does not necessarily serve the kinds of futures we want to make in terms of democracy, environmental, and social sustainability, and we argue that they should be re-thinked and critiqued. Thus, in this paper, we develop a critique of Creative-Ai through exposing tensions in the artifacts and agents situated in the ’Creative-Ai phenomena’ through speculative care imaginaries and by taking a feminist post-humanist orientation. We address the question of how care imaginaries/speculations can help us to unpack these desensitized and human-centered values and practices potentially embedded in Creative-Ai. We hope this paper to spark discussions and imaginaries on alternative ways of being with and thinking about Creative-Ai technologies particularly through the lens of ’care’. We conclude by discussing alternative care imaginaries as a method to reveal and in turn diversify the value sets and perspectives engaged in constructing Creative-Ai in the communities partaking in constructing these emerging technologies.

Link to the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3546155.3547278