On Friday morning, I received an email announcement for an upcoming installation at the Hopkins Center for the Arts: “Think you know AI? Meet Being.” The email and the Hopkins Center’s website with information about the event was filled with a cascading series of cringe-inducing red flags. The exhibition features a “virtual entity” trained on “anti-racist frameworks, Black queer poetry and vogue dancing” to get viewers “moving, thinking and collectively envisioning the future.” I didn’t even know where to start, other than to say “what the actual fuck” and file away another reason that the Luddites were onto something.
The project reframes the practice of using creative work to train AI by “pulling insights” from the social thinkers bell hooks, Cornel West and Paulo Freire, according to the event description. Can an AI model, which spits out the bastardized works of great thinkers, decolonize me while another AI model directs missiles in Gaza and another catalogues anti-ICE protesters in Portland and Minneapolis? But then again, to quote the trailer for Being, “no circumstances have power over you.” So I needn’t worry.
Being creator Rashaad Newsome said in a 2024 interview with SLUG Magazine about his creation that AI and machine learning are tools that “will, at best, be a mirror of their creators.” So then, why not go straight to the source?
Joseph Savage is a graduate student in the Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society program. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
