March 04, 2025
Last week, I gave a talk at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno about politics, AI, and ethics. It’s a topic I write and talk about a fair amount. I have my go-to examples, lines I use from Plato and Aristotle. But giving a talk at an art museum forced me to think about the topic in a new way. Talking about AI and politics in a museum is different from talking about it in room 307 or to a reporter.
In revisiting my typical talking points, I reaffirmed my belief that a lot of the new questions raised by AI are, in many ways, old questions about the connections between truth, persuasion, and rhetoric. Our concerns with AI echo Plato’s concerns about the sophists. In adding art to the conversation, I confronted questions about truth versus fact in painting - "deep fakes" in the form of oil painting and work done in darkrooms. Thanks to insights from Prof. Waisbord, I confronted questions of who an artist is or if the actual identity even matters. Both of which forced me to again consider what about AI is troubling in ways that Ben Franklin’s inventing news isn’t (or maybe should be) and whether or not something is news if it’s just an accumulation of facts and data. To Plato and Aristotle, I added Alfred Bierstad, Ansel Adams, Jeff Koons, and Marcel Duchamp.
A broader lesson I took from the exercise is to keep asking about why an issue or idea animates me. Am I responding because, in the moment, it reinforces something I want to be true? Does it easily align with a political party I support or oppose? Investing time in figuring out what is really motivating outrage or glee can make for better decisions and more informed actions.
I don’t have any more answers about AI today than I did before I gave the talk, but my questions and understanding are better, and that matters.