Expressive AI

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has produced a rich set of technical practices and interpretive conventions for building machines whose behavior can be narrated as intelligent activity. Artists have begun to incorporate AI practices into cultural production, that is, into the production of artifacts and experiences that function as art within the cultural field. In this paper I describe my own practice of AI-based cultural production: expressive AI. I will attempt to provide a preliminary understanding of this practice by both situating expressive AI with respect to other discourses on AI and by working inductively from my own AI-based art work. I will first provide a brief description of three of my AI-based art pieces. These will serve as concrete examples to ground the rest of the discussion. I will then describe the expressive AI practice by first situating it with respect to the GOFAI/interactionist AI debate, then by describing the central organizing metaphors of authorial and interpretive affordance, and finally by providing a preliminary set of desiderata for expressive AI practice.