Critical AI Resources
AI and Artists
Art and Algorithmic Resistance
Cultural Red Teaming: ARRG! & Creative Misuse of AI Systems. Eryk Salvaggio, Caroline Sinders, Steph Maj Swanson.
A Manifesto from a group of artists who leaked their secret OpenAI access key in protest of OpenAI's policies.
AI and Images (Art)
Artificial Imagination, Shane Denson.
Why AI isn't Going to Make Art, Ted Chiang.
"That’s Not Art:” Art Worlds Define Art Differently, Aaron Hertzmann.
AI and Images (Photography)
How to Read an AI Image, Eryk Salvaggio
Diffused Seeing: The Epistemological Challenge of Generative AI by Joanna Zylinska.
The Techno-Industrial-Art Complex
Amazon Cuts Ties with Riverside’s Cheech Museum After Show with Work Critical of the Tech Company
New York Times Profile of Alexander Reben, OpenAI's "Artist in Residence."
Sydney Skybetter’s Dancing With Robots Podcast: This episode is especially relevant.
AI Images and Representation
How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes, Victoria Turk in Rest of World.
Meta’s AI Stickers & Racism, Rhea Nayyar in Hyperallergic.
AI and Copyright / Intellectual Property
Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem, Gary Marcus and Reid Southen, and a followup on "accidental plagiarism" from Katie Conrad.
Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons, Data Provenance Initiative.
The Data That Powers AI is Disappearing Fast, Kevin Roose, NYTimes.
AI Hype
Challenging the Myths of Generative AI, Eryk Salvaggio, a summary of some shared myths that pull people's thinking about generative AI into unproductive directions.
The Danger of Superhuman AI is Not What You Think, Shannon Vallor.
Deconstructing the AI Myth: Fallacies and Harms of Algorithmification, Dagmar Monett and Bogdan Grigorescu.
Hype, Sustainability, and the Price of the Bigger-is-Better Paradigm in AI, Gaël Varoquaux, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, Meredith Whittaker.
The Simple Macroeconomics of AI, Daron Acemoglu. (Summary).
A Sanity Check on ‘Emergent Properties’ in Large Language Models, Anna Rogers.
AI’s Dehumanizing Metaphors
The TESCREAL Bundle: Eugenics and the Promise of Utopia Through Artificial General Intelligence. Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres.
Reclaiming AI as a Theoretical Tool for Cognitive Science. Iris van Rooij, Olivia Guest, et al.
You are Not a Parrot, profile of Emily Bender by Elizabeth Weil.
Human-Chatbot Relationships
Friend of Faux? Josh Dzieza.
Political Ideologies & Algorithmic Prediction
Destroy AI. Ali Alkhatib.
The Map is Eating the Territory, Henry Farrell.
Large Language Models Reflect the Ideologies of their Creators, Maarten Buyl, Alexander Rogiers, et al.
Business Models of AI, Labor
Brian Merchant, AI Generated Business: The Rise of AGI and the Rush to Find a Working Revenue Model.
Eryk Salvaggio, What the WGA Strike Says Tells Us About Workers Navigating AI, in Tech Policy Press.
Generative AI’s Impact on Creativity & Critical Thinking
Stephanie Tully, et al, 2025, Lower Artificial Intelligence Literacy Predicts Greater AI Receptivity.
Fan, Yizhou, et al. “Beware of metacognitive laziness: Effects of generative artificial intelligence on learning motivation, processes, and performance.” British Journal of Educational Technology, 10 Dec. 2024, https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.13544.
Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content, Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser.
Can LLMs Generate Novel Research Ideas? A Large-Scale Human Study with 100+ NLP Researchers, Chenglei Si, Diyi Yang, Tatsunori Hashimoto. (My rebuttal here).
The Effects of Generative AI on Design Fixation and Divergent Thinking, Samangi Wadinambiarachchi, Ryan M. Kelly, Saumya Pareek, Qiushi Zhou, Eduardo Velloso.
Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research, Lisa Messeri & M J Crockett.
Workers with less experience get most benefits from GenAI, paper by Danielle Li (full paper).
AI, Data Centers & the Environment
Critical Data Center Studies, Dustin Edwards, Zane Griffin Talley Cooper & Mel Hogan.
Why We Don’t Know AI's True Water Footprint, Miranda Gabbot.
The supply chain capitalism of AI: a call to (re)think algorithmic harms and resistance through environmental lens, Ana Valdivia.
Tech Won't Save Us: Data Vampires, Podcast Part 1, Part 2, Paris Marx.
Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, 2024 paper showing one AI generated image uses as much electricity as charging a cell phone.
Pengfei Li et al, “Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models.”
AI in Education
Andrew Myers, AI Detectors Biased Against Non-Native English Speakers.
Elizabeth Laird, AI in schools creates greater risk for marginalized students, Center for Democracy & Technology
A Critical Glossary
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Compute: What is Compute and Why Does it Matter? Jai Vipra & Sarah Myers West, AI Now Institute.
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Objectivity: The Myth of Objective Data, Melanie Feinberg
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