What if We Educated AI Based on the World We Want Instead of the World We Have?

My practice of Internet Imperialism is an example of how artificial intelligence and the Internet's algorithms are easily manipulated, and shows the bias in search engines. In understanding Search Engine Optimization or SEO, one understands that it is a process, which tends to benefit those with commercial incentives; inadvertently creating an Internet dominated by commerce over culture. It is from this content that some intelligent machines are haphazardly receiving their education. Anyone, anywhere, and for any reason can use SEO to direct/hack how important artificially intelligent machines are being educated.


INTRODUCTION
My practice of Internet Imperialism is an example of how artificial intelligence and the Internet's algorithms are easily manipulated, and shows the bias in search engines. In understanding Search Engine Optimization or SEO, one understands that it is a process, which tends to benefit those with commercial incentives; inadvertently creating an Internet dominated by commerce over culture. It is from this content that some intelligent machines are haphazardly receiving their education. Anyone, anywhere, and for any reason can use SEO to direct/hack how important artificially intelligent machines are being educated.
By using SEO to program my vision boards into the Internet's classroom I reverse the direction of AI, an inherently backwards-looking intelligence, into a forward-dreaming tool. One in which I use to share my hopes, dreams, and manifestation visionboards in Google results by way of SEO hypnosis. By utilizing standard keywords and manipulating them with robot poetry, as well as Natural Language Processing, programming, information theory, and metadata I have essentially tricked the search engine into believing my wishes, hopes, desires are accomplished, and have educated AI to create new visions of the future.

THE NEXT AMERICAN PRESIDENT
If we think of the Internet like an artistic and creative medium we begin to realise that demanding accuracy from it is misguided. Conversations about art are generally not served by real vs fake as much as by nuance, opinion, perspective, and metaphor. Right now, most AI systems are learning based on the world we have instead of the ones we hope for. Art is a form of possibility. By educating AI in this way I am able to change how AI understands being human, or for example being, "The Next American President".
Usually, if artificial intelligence were trying to predict what the next American President looked like it would look at all past American Presidents and more or less average them. For example: Washington's nose? But during the 2020 Presidential Election I created a Net Art Vision Board illustrating my hopes for THE NEXT AMERICAN PRESIDENT, expressed in art and text. In this human machine collaboration I weaved keywords through my art and manifestation scripting, and in return was able to manipulate search results, swapping existing results for my images/vision-boards.  When someone searches "The Next American President" they will look into the future at a president who believes in love, harmony, choice, nature, respect, democracy, joy, science, international corporation, campaign finance reform, and the rule of law via my Net Art Vision Boards.

Research methodology
In my search engine art/Internet Imperialism practice I use programming, information theory, search engine optimization, and meta data to inject my vision boards into the developing brain into Google's algorithms. My research is documented using Rhizome Conifer as each week a live recording of the change in search results is documented and archived.

Natural Language Processing
The internet can be seen as a global subconscious and, much like our own subconscious, it cannot tell the difference between a hoped-for future imagined through art and what has, in fact, already occurred. The Internet cannot parse desire. To parse is to divide into parts and identify the parts' relations to each other. When humans read, "Gretchen is really hoping that someday her work is on the cover of Artforum," humans understand quite naturally that there is a gap between where I want to be, on the cover of Artforum, and where I am now, presenting a paper at EVA. Humans understand the relationship between me and the object of my desire to be one of separation. But the Internet deals only in relevance and fails to grasp how words like "hope," "desire," and "want" change the relationship between subject and direct object.
I found the poetics of this compelling. Computers can't understand desire, ergo, desire is part of what makes us human.
The natural language processing I post across the Internet makes intentional use of the language of desire.

Basic HTML Alt text indicates to the Internet what an image is.
By tagging my vision boards with alt text ="The next American President" they are programmed as inputs into the current and future definition of "The Next American President." Meta data is also added to each vision board image.

SEO & Sites
Other tools include interlinking, URL management, and sites that allow users to post content such as Soundcloud, Yelp, Pinterist, and Quora.

Ethics
How is AI educated? By whom? And For whom? How is it that we are choosing to educate our machines and what, if any, role do the traditional image-based arts have in this tutelage? To consider this question is also to investigate the role and value of art to our human experience.
Unlike most forms of knowledge, art constitutes a unique form of knowledge that often conveys its information through the productive introduction of uncertainty instead of the firming of facts. When we look at a painting one of the important, often unconscious, transmissions that occurs is that the way the world is seen and understood is subject to personal interpretation. Through art we receive a jarring and expanding awareness of otherness. Uniquely, art can transmit a necessary uncertainty between how language relates to images, a profound way to know how differently it is possible to know, love and understand the world we all share.
By intentionally and systematically using art to train artificial intelligences we can make machines less sure that they have a complete handle on what it means, and looks like, to be human.
My artwork and research considers art's role in the education of intelligent machines, particularly as a way to inculcate IRL (in real life) complexity and diversity.

Next Steps For the Project
My vision boards visualise my hopes and dreams for the future whether that's the next American president, my artwork on the cover of Artforum, my inclusion at Art Basel Miami Beach, or how women are represented online. Because search engines are not tools to parse out fact or truth I am able to reverse the direction of artificial intelligence, making it a forward-dreaming tool of possibility.
I see this technological failing as one of hope; a potential positive outcome for humanity. And a chance to invite in more people, and more diverse perspectives, since anyone, anywhere, and for any reason can use SEO and user generated content to direct how certain important artificially intelligent machines are being educated.
When the Internets networks and algorithms, and technology in general are understood it becomes clear just how easily they can be manipulated.
The bias of search engines is highlighted in my work. Search engine results are not able to decipher my visions boards as art and not the next American President because of SEO manipulation.
The existing and potential networks that use images to enable human and machine interactions are wielded by humans. My search engine art demonstrates how you don't need power, money, or a foreign cyber government to have social, political, technological and environmental impact, just a bit of knowledge.