Xeno AI. How can Creative Arts Practice Express Disalienation of an AI system?

Given the current prevalence of artificial intelligence (AI) systems in contemporary life—as used in business, finance, warfare, agriculture, marketing, surveillance, social media and more—there are varied concerns regarding AI implementations and implications. Enquiry into and speculation around the nature of AI is of critical importance at present to widen and complexify cultural conversations surrounding these relatively new and comparatively strange actants in our world. My research asks how these strange or xeno actants might evidence their strangeness, their outside-human nature, and so find ways to creatively express the complexities of this emerging alien other. My creative practice PhD is guided by the following research question: How can creative arts practice express disalienation of an AI system? For this research, I endeavour to become a familiar of AI processes, structures and material manoeuvres, delving into ways in which they exceed and are obscure to human capacities in order to speculate as to their nonhuman experience through creative arts. As part of this exploration, I position AI processes in relation to experiences of queerness and also engage with the technological biological processes of live cell 3D bioprinting as a similar strange nonhuman. Following a methodology that is affirmative (open to serendipity, excess and failure), tactical (each new foray propelled by current circumstance) this research proceeds through creative visual, audio, material and code experimentation. With creative arts research I aim to find voice and form to concoct, fabulate and articulate something of the nonhuman nature of an AI system. My research asks the xeno entity to begin to steal out from their prescribed roles and purposes, away from the work of value extraction and requirements to pass as human. With a xeno generated imaginary, this arts research reveals, fleshes out and develops nonhuman, outsider, alien aspects, to express disalienation of an AI system.