As part of the Collective Action School 2023 (formerly known as Logic School), I developed a video work, “Thought forms on AI” to explore current industry led narratives on generative AI. A thought form has a double meaning - in psychology it refers to how a person’s thoughts are expressed through speech, in mysticism, it refers to the extrusion of thoughts into the external world.

When developing this piece, I was contemplating how industry narratives influence the way technology is imagined and produced. I wanted to reclaim the word imagine, a word that has been co-opted by Midjourney as a way of prompting their image generator. In doing so I reject the notion of imagination as a statistical function and instead use this work to extend new thought forms to the mind of the viewer.

In writing these prompts, I wanted to highlight how the most mundane, everyday algorithmic interactions such as likes and selfies are connected to the hidden and insidious costs of these technologies - exploited content moderators, surveilled warehouse and gig workers and the production of autonomous weaponry.