Much of the art produced with and about machine learning is too dazzled by its apparent capacities for human-like behavior to concern itself with the humans that it conceals and abuses. The best intentions cannot overcome the material reality of exploitation and the spectacular disappearance of labor required to maintain the participation of well-intentioned people. Generative AI, no matter how sophisticated, cannot function without this human labor and, crucially, it never will. It cannot sustain the fascinating illusion of its intelligence without concealing all of the human work and social relationships that brought something like Being into being.

Wax is a browser-based audio synthesis environment inspired by Max and other data-flow programming systems.