A collection of essays and visual art addressing fantasy and desire in the dream of 'artificial intelligence'.

Sam Lieblich, Emile Frankel, Luara Karlson-Carp, Vincent Lé

‘I 愛 AI’ is a book of essays, fiction, interviews and visual interventions that reintroduce sex, desire and politics into utopian fantasies of artificial intelligence, via psychoanalysis. Contributors bring their artistic practice, their style of living, or psychoanalytic theory, to demonstrate what AI, the thing, and AI the fantasy, is all about. Is it all it’s cracked up to be? Is it just a mirage? And if there is such a thing, does it dream, does it love, is it afraid, can it want? Is there any emancipatory potential in there at all?

Put it this way, sci-fi doesn’t tell a rosy tale of our co-existence with AI, but the businessmen have been saying machine-intelligence will save the Earth since the first mechanical calculator started doing office work in 1863. We want to know, why are these imaginings so at odds? Surely phallic utopian conceptions of the singularity and all that surrounds it–mind uploads, brain implants, virtual therapists, virtual lovers, sexbots–can’t be sustained when it’s so clear that all the species of algorithmic harmony are really just more of the same, but faster.

There is no choice but to reckon with the persistence of algorithmic control, and all that the cybernetic turn has given and taken; but do we need to hornily fantasise that the algorithm is our friend, our enemy, our equal? How in that reckoning do we account for indigenous knowledge practices, counteract repressive data surveillance, disavow the destruction of the land by the abstract algorithms in the sky? Can we honour human subjectivity as embodied, sensory, cultural, and inimitable without indulging in a blind anthropocentrism?