Critical collaging as an AI resistance strategy

Abstract

Academic scholarship and community activism initiatives are beginning to challenge and resist the incursion of commercial generative AI applications into everyday life and alleviate their impacts on people and the planet. This essay discusses using collage as a critical research practice to visualise the language of generative AI and to challenge the generic automated images produced by AI models. With these collages, I am attempting to provoke thought about how linguistic and visual rhetorical devices are used to describe generative AI. By pairing images with words in the collages, I am aiming to surface these meanings and feelings and examine what they reveal about the current moment in which a huge amount of hype but also critical responses to generative AI are circulating in popular culture and social and philosophical inquiry. My intention is not to provide a more ‘realistic’ visual portrayal of generative AI. Rather, it is to use a different, surprising, sometimes mordant or absurd, and more compelling visual language to trouble assumptions, disrupt the reductive stock imagery on which industry and popular culture rely and bring to visual life the rhetoric used in critical analyses of AI.