ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, IMAGES AND DESIGN: DEMYSTIFYING NARRATIVES AS A WAY TO IMAGINE ALTERNATIVE FUTURES

Resumo

In recent years, the increasing implementation of Artificial Intelligences in various design and production stages, as well as the circulation of its products in everyday life, has brought to the fore the urgent need to reflect its sociocultural impact, as well as the political contours of its popularization. More specifically within the field of Design, such a conjuncture seems more likely to weaken critical reflection on the field’s practices and principles than to lead to the much-publicized technological progress fallaciously regarded as unavoidable and so often associated with AI. The allied intersections between Design and the image, as evidenced by the frequent association of the former with visual communication, have also suggested renewed challenges to the field, since the confrontation between artificiality and reality now acquires new contours amid an era strongly oriented toward the circulation and consumption of media. Here we argue that, thanks to an intricate mythology associated with AI, as well as to a historical difficulty in defining the image, exponents of the field are continuously weakened by this new technological horizon, massively spearheaded by megacorporations and their interests. We therefore propose a demystification of this context as a route toward the necessary imagination and construction of alternative futures.