Please join us for Critical AI in the Art Museum: Practices & Politics 🤖, a series of online discussions happening in October & November 2023 on Zoom hosted at ANU, all welcome 🤗.

In this moment of environmental, political and pandemic accelerated crisis, art has become increasingly entangled with the cultural logic of analytics platforms, Silicon Valley imaginaries and planetary scale computing. And yet, in the art museum, ‘the digital’ has largely been understood as a tool, rather than a cultural form with specific socio-technical affordances and politics.

Under these conditions, various AI imaginaries💭 have begun to prosper across the art museum’s operations. For the exhibitions team, AI is to be celebrated as a tool of a new artistic avant-garde 🖼; for senior managers, AI is to be championed as a talisman of the institution’s contemporary relevance 👏; for communications teams, AI promises predictive insights into audience behaviours, maximising ‘engagement’🤳; for development teams, AI offers a gateway to lucrative relationships with the tech sector🤝; for museum eductators, AI is a troubling object that demands new pedagogies and literacies 🤔.

Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor in chief, told 404 Media that Jezebel was told “brand safety,” the fact that advertisers don’t want to be next to the type of content Jezebel was publishing, was “one of the biggest factors” that led G/O to stop publishing the site and lay off its staff. Tousignant said that a couple of weeks ago, the ads sales team asked if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline—“Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”—from the site.

“They took it off because they're like, let's see if this makes a huge difference,” Tousignant said. “So yeah, it was very much the problem here that no one will advertise on Jezebel because we cover sex and abortion. I know taking the tagline off was to see if the algorithm advertising would change. After it was removed one of the editorial directors was like, ‘I'm seeing an ad for J Crew for the first time ever, maybe this will be good.’”