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HUMAN DRAWS AI
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I’m drawing AI a lot these days. This is because we’re all talking about it, my clients are researching it and thinking about it and its impact on our learning, our living, and even our existing.
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It’s a cartoonist’s privilege to sprinkle speech and thought bubbles in and amongst hand drawn panels, to tell a story, to make a point, to crack a joke. After all, cartooning is a universal language.
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I guess a robot is the starting point for an anthropomorphised machine - the traditional way of depicting a computery thing. But AI is technology without a physical form, made possible by the collective power of distributed cloud computing. But a huge humming server farm doesn’t make for a great cartoon character - so how do I draw AI?
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The Big Magic Hat - created for UCD by Visual Thinkery
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I’ve been working with a research team from University College Dublin recently to help bring to life some interesting work they’ve done on AI use amongst educators. We visualised AI as a huge magic hat. What comes out seems incredible, but how it actually works is quite opaque…
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I harvested a conversation with collaborators at We Are Open Cooperative, who are working on a number of AI related research projects, and one in particular about AI literacies. Together, we leaned into the various ways people reference AI.
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Indeed, AI is the blanket term we have given to an ever-growing collection of different tools and systems. Anyone who’s selling anything is tripping over themselves to point to AI-enabled this and AI-powered that. And trying to draw it is problematic - It’s like trying to draw consciousness itself.
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HUMAN PROJECTION
The thing is, we project ourselves onto our pets, our Gods, and our kids. We’re wired to see the human in everything. We see faces in fluffy clouds and pieces of toast. I’m so empathetic that I don’t like to pop one last cup into the already-washing dishwasher before I go to bed, because I don’t want to interrupt its creative process…
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Using ChatGPT’s “infinite iris” logo, provides something semi-recognisable to use as an abstract character representing AI. And I found myself tracing a clean font for the AI speech-bubble as a way of differentiating it’s precise conversational output from that of hesitant humans.
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Here’s AI usefully depicted as a brain pump amplifying our cognition. The metaphor adds a dollop of “silly” - gold dust for cartoonists. And it begs the question, if you were to stop using the pump, would your head deflate to a saggy bag of noodles…?
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GenAI Agency - created for UCD by Visual Thinkery
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Leaning into the metaphor Agency - providing a useful double-meaning - and more gold for the humble cartoonist - I’m now depicting AI as a bespectacled agent. It’s less sinister than the Matrix version, but maybe dark glasses would change that.
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SOMETHING FROM NOTHING
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I’ve really enjoyed using AI recently to help with my programming. I know enough to go in the right direction, but ironing out all the schoolboy errors would sometimes take days of hunting through similar questions and answers online. AI is hungry. It needs to be fed. It has gobbled up all the Q&As and documentation… and here we are again, projecting human words onto invisible machines.
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And lastly, here’s AI as seen through a conversation I had with a Glaswegian statistician a while back…
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More power to your human elbows,
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