Why it matters
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 which dictate how the public imagines, talks about, and interacts with AI technologies.
Inspired by counter movements like slow fashion and slow food, it aims to subvert corporate-first thinking by collectively researching & practicing new perspectives such as Small AI, Ancestral AI, and Esoteric AI as ways to “imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within” - Ruha Benjamin.
Intro to Slow AI
How we did it
We invited critical AI researchers, designers, creative technologists, and artists to interrogate and publish critical AI discourse through community sessions, webwoven essays, and playful critiques.
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 (anthologies, Miro boards, zines, conversations, and artworks) shaped through collective inquiry. These artefacts grew out of open calls, facilitated sessions, research strands, and hands-on workshops where ideas were tested, composted, and transformed.
We invite you into this messy, generative archive below - we hope will spark fresh ways of thinking and talking about AI.
Project Diary
MUSONI [NASCIMENTO / BIRTH] by Thiago Britto, created for the Ancestral AI stream of Slow AI.
Output
What we made
Slow AI Preface
Since 2023, AIxDESIGN has been holding the idea of Slow AI and throughout 2024, we dove deep with research, community events, and artist collaborations to expand on what this might mean.
Read the Slow AI Preface
Small AI
Small AI questions the dominance of large-scale models by addressing environmental impact, discriminatory language, and cultural preservation.
It’s an invitation to use notions of fractals, friction, and fragmented-ness in nature and math to inspire ideas around Small AI and send ripples that shift practices around Big AI. It advocates for equitable, sustainable alternatives, prompting exploration of community-focused governance, and interconnectedness as pathways to more just futures. In this research we ask: What is possible when our objective is cultural creation and preservation instead of scale or profit?
Visit the Small AI Project Page
Esoteric AI
Esoteric AI challenges mainstream perceptions of AI as either disenchanted or enchanted, proposing alternative ways of seeing, sensing, and knowing AI that blur the seeming binary of magic and technology.
Inspired by feminist philosophy and science and technology studies, Esoteric AI seeks to trouble the normative understandings of AI and reclaim the feminine and the enchanted from the dominant ways they are projected onto AI. Just as a séance is a collective process, so is our reimagining and reenchanting of AI.
In this research we ask: What can we learn from il/legitimate predictive technologies of the past – (feminist) practices like astrology, tarot, Farmer’s Almanac?
Visit the Esoteric AI Project Page
Ancestral AI
Ancestral AI explores natural and cultural temporalities to better understand how we might create alternatives to the culture of Big Tech’s AI development: ‘always-on,’ ‘fast-paced’ or ‘time-blind’.
We document and investigate the wisdom of past generations, including time-tested approaches to building resilient complex systems.
In this research we ask: What can we learn from non-western and indigenous governance models, archiving practices, and data-led technologies?
Explore the Slow AI Miro Board
Explore the Slow AI Miro Board
Related projects.
(2019-25©)
