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What's the Art in Artificial Intelligence?: Inspiration: Octavia Butler

What's the Art in Artificial Intelligence?
Inspiration: Octavia Butler
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table of contents
  1. Concept Focus: Ethics
    1. Ethics | Cosmologyscape
    2. Ethics | Suzanne Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta)
  2. Concept Focus: Aesthetics
    1. Aesthetics | In The Raw
    2. Aesthetics | Denise Ferreira da Silva
    3. Aesthetics | Rizvana Bradley
  3. Inspiration: Octavia Butler
  4. Artist Focus: Beth Coleman
  5. Artist Focus: American Artist
  6. Artist Focus: Sondra Perry
  7. Artist Focus: Mimi Onuoha
  8. Midjourney Tutorial: Step One

INSPIRATION: OCTAVIA BUTLER

Many contemporary artists talk about being inspired by science fiction writer Octavia Butler (b. 1947, d. 2006). Watch this 2005 interview with Butler on the independent news program, Democracy Now!

Video Duration: 15 min 39 sec (clip begins 0:00, ends 15:39)
Total Time for Activity: 30 minutes

Who is Octavia Butler?

Octavia Butler in interview with Amy Goodman and Juan González,'Remembering Octavia Butler: Black Sci-Fi Writer Shares Cautionary Tales In Unearthed 2005 Interview.' Youtube, uploaded by Democracy Now!, February 23, 2021.

QUOTATION

In the interview, Butler shares a verse that she wrote after hearing someone -- as she recounts it -- "answer a political question with a political slogan and he didn't seem to realize that he was quoting somebody. He seemed to have thought that he had a creative thought." The verse she wrote in response to this observation is the following:

Beware
All too often, we say
What we hear others say
We think
What we are told
That we think
We see
What we are permitted to see
Worse,We see
What we are told that we see
Repetition
And pride
Are the keys to this.
To see
And to hear
Even an obvious lie
Again
And again
And again
May be to say it
Almost by reflex
Then to defend it
Because we have said it
And at last to embrace it
Because we've defended it
And because we cannot admit
That we've embraced
And defended
An obvious lie
Thus without thought
Without intent
We make mere echoes of ourselves.

REFLECTION

Reflect on the line "We make mere echoes of ourselves" from Butler's verse. Compare this kind of echo-making to that described in the following lines excerpted from a poem written by writer Gwendolyn Brooks to honor Mayor Harold Washington, the first African-American elected mayor in the city of Chicago:

Beyond steps that occur and close,
your steps are echo-makers.

You can never be forgotten.


What is the difference between these two kinds of echo-making described by Butler and Brooks?

From what you currently understand of AI, where do you situate the kind of repetition that it typically produces when used without attention to issues of ethics and aesthetics? Give examples.

As you continue through the next chapters on individual artists, think about the way each of them are working deliberately between the two kinds of echo-making described by Butler and Brooks



Octavia Butler in interview with Amy Goodman and Juan González,'Remembering Octavia Butler: Black Sci-Fi Writer Shares Cautionary Tales In Unearthed 2005 Interview.' Youtube, uploaded by Democracy Now!, February 23, 2021.
Gwendolyn Brooks, "Mayor Harold Washington." In Blacks. Chicago: Illinois, 1994

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Artist Focus: Beth Coleman
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