Inteligência artificial como phármakon: a arte algorítmica entre o remédio e o veneno

Abstract

This visual essay presents images from the Poisonous, Harmful and Suspicious series, which I created and is still in progress. Developed with artificial intelligence resources, the series focuses on plants prohibited by the colonial “civilizing” process due to their use in sacred rituals and hallucinogenic and aphrodisiac powers, contradicting the canon of the ideally morally and physically superior European white man. The project critically addresses models based on the so-called Natural Language, which create images from texts and other images in an almost intersemiotic process of translation. The title of the work is borrowed from a 19th century scientific manual, published in England by the Christian Scientific Society, authored by Anne Pratt (1857). Through the counterpoint between poison and medicine, which constitute the ambivalence of the pharmakon, it questions how artificial intelligence reinforces colonialist and anthropocentric assumptions, while at the same time open up possibilities for new alterities between humans and non-humans.