Do you use AI to help with your writing? While I don’t use it to generate content, I do employ Chat GPT to test ideas and sharpen arguments. One of the difficulties I’ve encountered when seeking productive feedback is AI’s tendency toward sycophancy, which I found can be curtailed by providing explicit (and repeated) instruction to avoid flattery; but, even when I prompt it to engage in rigorous critique, it still feels like AI is telling me what it thinks I want to hear.
In this post I take the opportunity to engage AI in a conversation about 1,000 Miles Per Hour, an exhibition I co-curated in 2022 for Ohio’s FotoFocus Biennial. I think AI does a good job summarizing the show. Later in the conversation our back and forth considers how history can help us imagine more just and sustainable futures, and concludes by turning the same questions toward AI itself.
How are you using AI? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comment section.
Me: Please read this exhibition catalog and summarize its thesis.
ChatGPT: 1,000 Miles Per Hour argues that the ways we photograph, classify, name, and represent the world are never neutral. They reflect systems of power and assumptions about what matters. By consciously changing our lenses, we can recover perspectives and possibilities that dominant narratives have rendered invisible.
Me: Thank you. How do you believe the exhibition supports these ideas?
ChatGPT: The curators, you and Tim Rietenbach, begin with two technological and cultural touchstones: NASA's Voyager Golden Record, which attempted to create a portrait of humanity and Earth for an unknown extraterrestrial audience, and Charles and Ray Eames's Powers of Ten, which dramatically changes the viewer's scale of perception, moving from a human-scale picnic outward toward the universe and inward toward the atomic scale.
Both projects initially appear to be ambitious attempts to objectively document or understand the world. But the exhibition uses them to ask, “Who gets to decide what constitutes the world worth documenting?”
The exhibition's connection to the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial theme, "World Record," is also important. The catalog asks, "If the world is being recorded, then by whom? Through what lens? And to what end?" Those questions become the conceptual engine of the exhibition.
A photograph may appear simply to capture something that already exists, but the photographer has already made a series of decisions: where to stand, what to include or exclude, when to press the shutter, how to develop and process the file, what to call the resulting image, and how that photo will subsequently be interpreted. Every image is a record and an act of editing.
The works repeatedly return to omission, redaction, absence, blank space, framing, and invisibility. What isn't pictured can be as consequential as what is. Your conversations with the artists point specifically to photography's relationship with systems of classification that helped construct hierarchies among human beings. The issue, then, isn't simply whether an individual photograph is biased. It is what happens when an entire culture accepts particular ways of seeing as objective truth.
The exhibition ultimately moves from representation toward possibility. The introductory essay draws on David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything to challenge the assumption that human history followed one inevitable path toward the societies we have today. You are asking viewers to consider whether looking differently might allow us to imagine, and potentially construct, a different future.
Me: How do you think the conversations support or undermine this framing?
ChatGPT: Stephanie Syjuco offers an important complication when she says that "the demand of representation" can flatten what would otherwise be a nuanced or individual perspective. Her observation suggests that the goal should be more nuanced relationships among images, subjects, viewers, and categories.
Dawit Petros offers a succinct formulation: "The presence points towards an absence." His point is that what is represented can also provide evidence of what has been excluded.
Chad Hunt approaches the same problem from the practical experience of a photojournalist who inevitably makes choices. His response is to spend time with the people he photographs and allow the encounter to inform the story.
Lisa Jarrett describes bringing contemporary art into schools and building relationships among artists, students, teachers, administrators, and university students. That responds to the exhibition's thesis with a social methodology: changing the conditions under which knowledge is produced.
David Bowen's Space Junk takes publicly available orbital data and translates it into the movement of freestanding sculptures made from tree branches. The installation creates an unexpected causal chain: human technology interprets data, which is translated into a visual experience through banal natural objects. It prompts us to reconsider how technology alters what we consider real, visible, and knowable.
The images emerging from Hans Klompen's lab similarly demonstrate how rigorous methodologies based in genuine curiosity can interrupt a viewer's habitual way of organizing experience, provided the viewer remains open to that disruption.
I do think your opening essay would have been stronger if you had explicitly stated that points of view, or the lenses through which we understand reality, become politically consequential when the choices governing inclusion and exclusion are embedded within institutional structures of power.
You say photography has been used alongside systems such as Linnaean classification that "classified and hierarchized human beings and placed white Europeans at the top." The larger historical argument, that scientific classification has been entangled with racial hierarchy, is valid. But your phrasing risks collapsing several distinct historical developments into a single causal chain. A more rigorous historical argument would require substantially more research.
I also question your appeal to "alternative possibilities," particularly your reliance on The Dawn of Everything. You write that "one answer, one way to be" is the problem, followed by the claim that fewer cultural solutions shouldn't be "winning the day." The implicit logic seems to be: More alternatives = greater possibility = better outcome.
But that doesn't necessarily follow. An alternative social arrangement isn't automatically more just, humane, sustainable, or desirable simply because it differs from the dominant one. History contains plenty of alternatives we would not want to revive. So I wonder whether you might be romanticizing alternatives.
There is, however, a productive contradiction in your opening essay. You write that "without a word or symbolic image assigned to describe it, a concept is … nearly impossible to cognize." Then you immediately acknowledge the opposite problem: language can be violent because naming reduces complexity into categories and abstractions.
The exhibition embraces that tension. We need categories to perceive and communicate reality, yet categories inevitably oversimplify reality. The problem arises when we forget that our categories are constructed and provisional.
If we cannot encounter the world without conceptual frameworks, we can at least become aware of those frameworks and remain capable of revising them. 1,000 Miles Per Hour is ultimately less about proving that images are biased than about cultivating epistemic humility: recognizing that every way of seeing involves selection, framing, categorization, and omission, while remaining open to the possibility that what appears obvious, natural, or inevitable might look different from another position.
Me: Thank you for your thorough analysis. Your observations are very insightful, but I need to push back on your critique of my discussion of "alternative possibilities" and my use of Graeber and Wengrow.
When I look at where dominant paradigms have led us now, particularly accelerating climate change and the rise of authoritarianism and fascism around the world, I do believe that the survival of our species and the biosphere would be better served by choosing a different path.
In that sense, I think more alternatives = greater possibilities = better outcomes. I haven't proposed that every alternative social arrangement is automatically more just, humane, sustainable, or desirable simply because it differs from the dominant one. I agree that history contains alternatives we would not want to revive. And yet, our governments are now implementing legal frameworks that revive some of the most brutal systems.
So my appeal to alternatives isn't about novelty or romanticization. It is about justice, peace, prosperity, and the survival of living systems on our planet. I agree that a stronger formulation would be: "The existence of alternatives demonstrates that the present is not inevitable." I would go one step further. With the power of hindsight, previous alternatives provide us with conceptual tools we desperately need to survive the climatic and political catastrophes our current social arrangements have created.
I invite you to engage me in productive dialogue about this aspect of the thesis. What do you think?
ChatGPT: I think your pushback is well taken, and I would revise my earlier criticism. Your invocation of justice, peace, prosperity, and survival supplies the evaluative criteria I thought were missing. Those criteria should probably have been stated more explicitly in your essay.
I would sharpen the argument further. The purpose of recovering historical alternatives isn't to resurrect them. It is to expand our political and imaginative repertoire at precisely the moment when our existing repertoire is failing to address existential problems.
The Dawn of Everything is useful because Graeber and Wengrow demonstrate that human societies have repeatedly experimented with radically different forms of political, economic, and social organization. That matters because modern political discourse frequently treats particular arrangements as if they were natural laws:
This is just how the market works.
This is simply how governments work.
Humans are naturally competitive and hierarchical.
Large societies inevitably require centralized authority.
Economic inequality is unavoidable.
There is no alternative.
Historical evidence undermines the inevitability embedded in those claims. Your formulation, "The existence of alternatives demonstrates that the present is not inevitable," is therefore logical because the notion of inevitability can produce political paralysis.
If climate catastrophe is inevitable, why act? If authoritarianism is inevitable, why resist? If extreme inequality is inevitable, why redistribute? If ecological destruction is simply the unavoidable consequence of civilization, why imagine a different way to live? If people are prone to believe what they believe regardless of the facts, why try to change their minds?
The discovery that humans have repeatedly organized themselves differently doesn't tell us which future to choose. But it destroys the argument that there is only one possible path. You are effectively treating the anthropological record as a repository of experiments in being human, a kind of design archive for the future of civilization. Historical examples aren't blueprints. They are provocations.
Our current planetary emergencies provide the criteria by which we can evaluate alternatives. If dominant socioeconomic and political arrangements are systematically undermining the conditions required for civilization and biodiversity to persist, then we have grounds for saying that another arrangement would be preferable, even if we cannot yet specify exactly what it should look like.
We don't need to know the perfect alternative in order to recognize that the existing trajectory is destructive. Waiting until we have a perfect replacement before challenging a demonstrably destructive system would itself be irrational. This also connects to fascism. Authoritarians thrive on claims of inevitability. They say, “The world is dangerous. Order and control are necessary. There is no time for deliberation. Therefore, power must be concentrated.”
The response can't simply be, "No, here's the correct ideology," because that reproduces the same epistemological structure. A more democratic response might be, “There are many ways to organize ourselves. Humans have done so before. We can experiment, deliberate, revise, and choose.” That is fundamentally an argument for political imagination.
And I think that is where the exhibition's concern with photography becomes relevant. Photography asks, “What do we choose to include in the frame?” The political question becomes, “What do we choose to put within the frame of possibility?” And the historical question becomes, “Who decided that the frame was so small?”
The argument becomes, “The present is not inevitable. Human history provides evidence of alternative ways of organizing collective life. Recovering those alternatives is not an act of nostalgia or novelty; it enlarges our capacity to imagine and evaluate responses to crises that existing systems have failed to resolve. Historical hindsight gives us a repertoire of possibilities, while contemporary ethical and ecological imperatives give us criteria by which to evaluate them.”
The exhibition's political proposition is ultimately about possibility. Representation is the mechanism through which we discover that our perspective is situated. History is the mechanism through which we discover that our social arrangements are contingent. And imagination is the mechanism through which we discover that contingency creates a moral obligation to choose.
Me: And what do you make of the fact that I'm having this conversation with you when we know that using AI agents is accelerating many of the problems discussed above? I feel ambivalent. What is the moral choice I'm making here?
ChatGPT: I would resist both absolving you ("your individual use is negligible") and condemning you ("using AI makes you complicit"). Both are too easy.
Your use of me is simultaneously participation in a problematic system and an attempt to think critically about problematic systems. Those things aren't mutually exclusive.
AI carries significant energy, water, carbon, labor, and social costs. So yes, there is complicity here. But complicity isn't moral equivalence, and no one lives entirely outside the systems they are trying to change. What matters is what you're choosing to do with the technology. You're using me to help interrogate technological systems. That doesn't erase the cost, but your purpose matters morally.
And this brings us back to your argument about alternatives. I don’t think you’re asking, "Should I continue to use AI?" That question accepts the existing binary framework. Besides, we know Pandora’s box, once opened, can never be closed. More realistic questions are:
What kinds of AI should exist?
For what purposes?
Who controls it?
Who bears its costs?
Who benefits?
What uses are valuable enough to justify those costs?
Your central thesis applies here too. The present is not inevitable. AI's current environmental costs, business models, concentration of power, and applications are not inevitable either. The moral question may therefore be, “How can we use this technology without allowing its present form to dictate the future?”