Massage the Machine

InDesign, 2025.

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.