Massage the Machine

InDesign, 2025.
Timeline: 2 weeks
With the distrust in higher education we are seeing in the
current political climate, tech literacy is so incredibly
important. I hope that this piece serves as a step towards
demystifying the workings of AI in a way that is accessible
to a non-CS audience.
For this project, I was interested in exploring the
limitations of AI, particularly its interpreting and image
labeling abilities. For example, before it was discontinued,
the dataset ImageNet was notorious for labeling images in a
way that perpetuated harmful stereotypes towards
marginalized identities.
Drawing inspiration from the essay, Excavating AI, and the
art theory novel, The Medium is the Massage, this zine aims
to educate the larger public on the limitations of AI. Upon
careful examination, the root causes of these mistakes
reveal a greater message about the language of seeing an
image. The difficulty of formalizing the function where we
see an image, interpret its meaning, then attach a label to
it, is a testament to how powerful human language is.
Full process on
Github.