2 min read ​Read online​

#35 | Draw what you think alexa looks like

Hello dear reader,

Whether to have voice assistants in your house and around your family draws a rather polarised response at a dinner party. We swing from “God no! Can’t have that thing listening to me all the time”, to, “I love being able to play music from anytime anywhere!”.

But those responses are from all the adults at that dinner party.

What about the kids in the other room keeping themselves entertained with toys and crayons?What if I asked them what they thought of Alexa?

What does Alexa look like?

Draw What You Think Alexa Looks (2019) Like is a wonderful zine project by creative technologist Melanie Hoff. It invites us to ask a deceptively simple question:

This is a collection of drawings by kids growing up interacting with an AI assistant in response to the question, “draw what you think Alexa looks like.” A printed zine that explores how children are imagining the physical form of a disembodied AI assistant.

My Thoughts

Did you feel a little awed, a little surprised, or a little dismayed by these drawings? I sure did.

By visualising who kids imagine devices to be, we ask ourselves: what does effort look like? Who thinks, searches, calculates, computes, answers?

My Claude is a young British voice. Set to a style called Buttery, speaking at normal speed. Why? I guess I read one too many British classics growing up (colonial hangover in the Indian education system?) and now I implicitly think an encyclopedia, or something smart, must sound like someone British. Someone old, in a tweed coat and a flat cap. Sir Attenborough perhaps.

We anthropomorphise AI voice agents all the time.

We say please and thank you. We swear. We give them names and voices and genders and accents. Sometimes faces and avatars too.

It’s easy to lose criticality after this level of anthropomorphising. It’s called cognitive surrender [link].

People routinely outsource critical thinking, reasoning, and decision making to AI. It’s a gradual shift away from typing “What to make with leftover pumpkin” in Google, toward asking Claude “Here’s a picture of my leftover pumpkin, give me options to cook”. Instead of looking up a book, or asking a friend, or even better—taking a moment to just… recall from your own memory.

In this playful approach that Melanie Hoff takes, the children visualise AI as embodiments of effort and all the emotions attached to it.

We, the viewers are invited to examine our own relationship with AI systems. To check our own anthropomorphising, reflect upon our reliance, and perhaps even walk away with some sense of what our personal boundaries with AI might look like.

Drawing What Alexa Looks Like is the very beginning of ascribing an identity to an inanimate, non-human AI system. Art is a powerful tool here for making our reliance on AI visible. A powerful tool for inquiry, reflection, and course-correction.

I hope this project helps you reflect on your own boundaries with AI as it has helped me reflect on mine, and helps you help your clients reflect on theirs.

Melanie Hoff is an artist and educator examining the role technology plays in social organization and reinforcing hegemonic structures. Their work uncovers coded conventions of norms, interfaces, and sex, through software, installation, and new choreographies of exchange. They are a founding member of the Cybernetics Library, an art and research collective offering resources for study and critique of technosocial systems and Soft Surplus, a collective art studio warehouse for learning together by making things near each other. They teach at the Rhode Island School of Design, the School for Poetic Computation, and have presented their work at the Tate Exchange London, the New Museum, the Queens Museum, The Internet Archive, Pioneer Works, and elsewhere.

Find artist Melanie Hoff here, and more on this project here.

You can find a template of Draw What You Think Alexa Looks like here.

Take care and see you soon,
Harshali
Founder, TinT
​

Follow along on @be_tint​
For more resources view the website​
Connect with me, Harshali on LinkedIn​