gameifesto

A manifesto-game (gameifesto) concerning the reclamation of connection, creation, and imagination

Ironically away from groupthink and the corporate gaze

Cliff Watson, 10/25/23 

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has recently exploded onto the digital scene impacting how we search, how we write, how we create art, how we draw connections and interpret, how we prioritize thoughts.

AI has limited what we know and how we know and understand what-is by creating expensive (in time, carbon footprint, and computing resources) models that parse what-is into a simulation of the world (SW). The SW is spinning on the axis of interpretation of the owners and creators of the model, then farmed out to the hapless user to pull from.

The result is a mish mash of Wikipedia-like facts, corporate marketing-speak, pointers to partner sites, and jumbled misinterpretations of what-is based on the way generative AI makes connections based on context without understanding content.

I would posit that the AI output is in fact a manifesto on how to interpret the world as provided by late-stage capitalist robber barons who care not for facts but, rather, dollars; it is a zero-sum game where they win, and we lose.

This scenario is ripe for artistic intervention. Thus, some tenets:

1. Given the scale of AI, create a game played by a large number of people.

2. In opposition to the loss of creativity, create a game that reclaims theater of the mind.

3. Against the cultivated content that steers towards whitewashed understandings, create a game that provides lenses to unsettle, reframe, and reinterpret the information provided.

4. Provide a humanization of the automated through an affective intervention.

5. Turn from the pre-cast representative to the performative.