anti-ai manifesto

This artist's book is a critical commentary on the pervasive nature of AI and startup culture. It's structured in three sections: collected articles about AI developments, visual ephemera from and about the tech world, social media posts, Reddit threads, screenshots, and personal reflections and notes on this cultural phenomenon.

The cover is constructed from a hackathon "swag" bag featuring various AI startup logos, immediately signaling the work's satirical intent. Initially, I wanted to conceive the book as a mass-produced object, mirroring the "move fast" ethos of tech culture. That changed after a weekend I spent at home and in San Francisco, interacting with people in this space revealed a troubling disconnect from craft and intentional making. One conversation stuck with me: someone watched me drawing assets by hand and said, "I am surprised they haven't AI-automated that process yet."

The whimsical and satirical aesthetic underscores the critique, positioning slow, material craft against the relentless push toward algorithmic production. The book is hand-bound, which makes the act of making it inseparable from its argument: what do we lose when everything becomes optimized, automated, and stripped of human touch?

Through its form and content, the book questions the value of labor and meaning in an AI-saturated world. The three-section structure moves from the external (industry articles and media) to the internal: personal notes and reflections that resist the clean, scalable logic the tech world applies to everything, including creativity itself.