IMG: Weaving Wires, Hanna Barakat & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN, 2024

IMG: Source Unknown

Throughout 2023, we in the AIxDESIGN community grew increasingly disillusioned with the dominant discourse and narratives around AI: Stories told and retold by Big Tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, which dictate how the public imagines, talks about, and interacts with AI technologies.

For-profit products such as ChatGPT and the organizations behind them have come to define public perception not only of what AI is but also of what it can and will likely become. These narratives are not neutral; they serve the interests of the tech giants who seek to maximize growth, profit, and stakeholder value - the usual imperatives of capitalism.

‘Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft were quoted 20x more than the remaining top 20 orgs put together.’

- Framing AI: Beyond Risk and Regulation, Rootcase, 2023

This landscape leaves little space for alternative visions to take root.

Taglines like ‘AI benefits all of humanity’ push forward underlying ideologies and beliefs, created to sway public opinion into believing that artificial general intelligence (AGI) not only exists, but will lead us to ‘a promised land’ and bring about ‘human salvation.’

‘Silicon Valley’s most powerful monopoly may be how we perceive technology.’

At the same time, there is a lot of panic around AI. Fear-mongering headlines dominate the news, sounding alarms about whether AI will replace us or go rogue.

Not all fears are unfounded. Very real harms and risks - from AI displacement and bias to environmental impact and more - are justifiably fueling collective concerns.

IMG: Source Unknown

Struggling to reconcile these stories - AI as the key to humanity’s salvation or its doom - public discourse often swings between two polarizing positions:

👍 with techno-optimist / hype / utopia

👎 and doomers / criti-hype / dystopia

Neither seems helpful to us. This binary framing of two warring visions is not fertile ground for constructive conversations. It traps us in false debates and fails to capture the nuanced and complex ways AI is already shaping our lives, in both beautiful and concerning ways.

AI isn’t coming in the future - it’s already here, influencing how we live, work, and connect with others every day. AI is a tool - excellent for certain tasks but limited in others. What matters most is who makes these tools, how they deploy them into the world, and how people use them.

Not resonating with either extreme, we try to practice a third position. One that exists in the in-between, acknowledges a plurality of (sometimes conflicting) truths and centers our agency within them.

‘There are “non-grief” ways of thinking through a philosophy of artificialized intelligence that are neither optimistic nor pessimistic, utopian nor dystopian.”

- The Five Stages Of AI Grief, Benjamin Bratton, 2024

IMG: Image to Audio Corruption 02 by Cristóbal Ascencio & Archival Images of AI + AIxDESIGN, 2024

IMG: Labour/Resources, Clarote, 2023

But why do the stories we tell about AI matter?

‘The narrative wars around AI aren’t just about words and concepts. The ways in which AI is framed and which narratives will stick in the popular imagination are deeply entangled with the ways in which the technical elements of AI will interweave with broader societal dynamics.’

- Future Art Ecosystems Annual Briefing on Public AI, 2024, Serpentine Arts Technologies and the Creative AI Lab

Put simply, media coverage, along with propaganda and public discourse, shapes public perception. This influences not only how people understand AI (both experts and non-experts alike) but also how we imagine and build these technologies.

IMG: Braided Networks, Jazmin Morris, 2024

So, if the stories we tell → shape our beliefs → shape our imaginations → then our actions → and, finally, our realities → can we reverse-engineer this process to bring forth new realities?

We, at AIxDESIGN, think so.

To quote the more eloquent Donna Haraway:

‘It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’

This is where the Slow AI: From Dreams to Practice research project was born. Instead of working within the symptoms and constraints of dominant ideologies, we felt a strong urge to address the ways we think and talk about AI - and to summon alternative imaginaries that might, in turn, bring forth new realities.

Beyond critiquing Silicon Valley ideologies, we want to imagine alternative narratives for AI as pathways to:

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‘imagine and craft the world we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within.’

- Ruha Benjamin

We don’t aim for a prescriptive solution, but rather a kaleidoscopic plurality of views. Perspectives that resist binary thinking, embrace nuance and stay open to “weird” and novel ways of seeing AI and imagining future(s) for humankind.

IMG: Multiplexing, Sophie Douala, 2021

IMG: Timnit Gebru Is Building a Slow AI Movement, Ieee Spectrum, Eliza Strickland, 2022

Slow AI seeks to subvert corporate-first thinking by collectively exploring how the values of mindfulness, care, and community can be applied to AI development and deployment. Just as slow fashion and slow food prioritize quality, locality, and sustainability over mass-produced, generic, over-engineered products, Slow AI brings these same values into the evolving technological landscape.

The term “slow AI” emerged from grumblings within the AI research field, though its exact origins are unclear. We first stumbled upon it in an IEEE Spectrum article about Timnit Gebru starting DAIR (Distributed AI Research Institute). Wherever it came from, it stuck with us - a powerful shorthand that quickly and intuitively conveys what the project is about.

Latching onto this language of “slow-ness” that also permeates countermovements like slow fashion and slow food, we seek to position our research outside, beyond the dominant and more familiar context of “fast AI.”

We’re not attached to or claim the term “slow AI,” but invite the ideas it may hold. We see Slow AI as a framework for seeding thought and offering our interpretations, and invite you to expand it with us.

Throughout 2024, we invited critical AI researchers, designers, creative technologists, and artists to explore these concepts in ways that made sense to us - such as community sessions, web-woven reports, Miro boards, experiential artworks, and zine-making workshops with Internet Teapot.

Below, you can find an overview of our main research questions and approach:

If you’re curious, you can dig deeper into the methodology and approach here.

From all this research, we published a hot compost pile of research artefacts which we invite you into below - and we hope will spark fresh ways of thinking and talking about AI.

By collectively researching and practicing alternative ways of understanding and approaching AI, we hope to empower a global community of practitioners, thinkers, and makers to join critical AI discourse and lay claim to their own visions of the present and futures alongside AI.

We’d love to hear if and how Slow AI takes root in your minds, practice, projects, and worlds!

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