AI Winter Is Coming

Cam Smith helped create Siri. He worked in Silicon Valley for six years, much of the time at Apple, where he trained nascent language learning models to parrot human language and perfect the craft of next-word prediction. Like a lot of tech workers, he didn’t grasp the extent of the Pandora’s Box they were building at the time. He also couldn’t predict the way tech oligarchs would wield AI. When he finally quit tech two years ago to pursue making art full-time, he set out to use his toolset to expose the corruption at the heart of those corporations. “I view my art practice as critically engaging with technology—taking ideas and tools from the tech industry and exploring and exaggerating them to show their shortcomings and weaknesses,” he told me over email. Tonight you can see Smith’s work at Passable Art in his solo show Surveillance State of Mind.

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