As Colleen Laird writes for the nomination:
"There is, perhaps correctly, a proliferation of pieces engaging with AI. I find works that engage with the process of using AI (e.g., a transparency of prompts or a reflection of interaction) to be far more interesting than displays of results. AI and ‘Being Human’ is such an endeavour, and a stake-holding one at that. It treats the desktop documentary not simply as a mode of presentation but as a process of decolonial unlearning. It highlights a way of making visible how AI technologies discipline and racialise our definitions of ‘the human’ by working through autoethnographic encounters with multiple AI platforms. Here we have the friction and ambivalence that occurs when AI flattens cultural complexity into sanitised universals. This is videographic criticism that does its thinking out loud."

And “thinking out loud” is precisely what the video experiments with: the encounter between the human and the AI interface, and the assumptions about “the human” that emerge there. In the case of the video, being human is inseparable from a rich cultural heritage - one that is often erased or flattened by the technologies we interact with.

A huge thank you to Alan O’Leary, who actively supervised the project. Thanks also to Pablo Velasco and Christian Ulrik Andersen for the course "AnotherAI", which created the conditions for this video essay to come into being.

If you still haven't watched the video, you can do so here:
👉 https://www.screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-15-1/ai-and-being-human