Artificial Art

At this moment in time, tools such as Mechanical Turk are on the verge of being “locked-in”: permanently fixing the way we approach the global workforce. Naturally, once designs get locked in it becomes challenging to break free from the modes of thinking they have gradually established. In the case of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace where Requesters post repetitive, creatively-stagnating tasks for a distributed workforce to complete for a miserly commission, it is crucial to question and to think about the responsibility the service carries in the creation of new social and cultural sensibilities. Through this absurd exhibition and auction, Artificial Art presents traces of online labor while working within the confines of MTurk’s privacy policy and terms of use. While MTurk uses Artificial Artificial Intelligence - cheap human workers from across the globe - to execute dull tasks that computers should be able to do but can’t yet, the project puts their creativity into use and celebrates what it means to be human.

The first part of the project began with an experiment: I wanted to see how workers respond to unconventional tasks that require the worker's use of creativity and a true non-artificial intelligence. I wanted to flip the roles MTurk suggests: instead of being one of the people who commission other people to carry out uninspiring robotic tasks, I decided to build the HIT (Human Intelligence Task) Generator, an algorithm that randomly generates thousands of inspiring drawing instructions for every worker to work on.

For the second part of the project, the drawings created by the “artists” (recognized by their unique Provider ID) through the site were collected and presented in a book form. The third and final part of the project focused on questions of ownership, authorship, and on the legal nuances relating to MTurk’s terms and conditions; the collection of drawings were exhibited at a gallery space in DUMBO, and were eventually sold at the live auction closing the event (all drawings sold for more than triple their commission value).

To read more about the project and view all images from the exhibition and auction, visit artificialart.net.