Alasdair Milne

This book project proposes an ontology of collaboration for and from machine learning art practice. It is based on research conducted over four years within the Creative AI Lab, part of the Arts Technologies department at Serpentine Galleries in London alongside artists, curators and technologists. It investigates the widely circulating question of human-machine collaboration, in which humans routinely claim to ‘collaborate with’ machine learning technologies, and subjects this claim to sustained philosophical scrutiny. It goes on to take a critical position on the use of such ‘collaborationist’ language with respect to AI. Adopting a conceptual engineering methodology, the book refines a conception of collaboration which is domain-specific, contradistinguished from adjacent concepts such as ‘co-authorship’, ‘co-operation’ and ‘collective intelligence’.