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This month, Berlin-based multidisciplinary designer, creative technologist, and artist Tabitha Swanson explains why she is pivoting away from the creative industry to focus on tech policy. She also has some thoughts about why you should consider the shift.

Tabitha is an immersive world-builder and a wise, compassionate force in our reality of tech monopolism (just read her substack). Her beautiful and strange digital spaces have been exhibited at Miami Art Basel, Fotografiska, and Transmediale, and we had the pleasure of collaborating with her on a face filter some years ago. Today, Tabitha writes about the corporations deciding the future of creative labor — and why artists and designers must take a seat at the table where AI laws are being made. Over to Tabitha.

FROM CREATIVITY TO POLICY

By Tabitha Swanson

My friend recently called me a slasher. I laughed and asked what that was, and he told me it’s a person who does one thing slash another thing slash another thing, and so on. And it’s true. I’ve had so many jobs, I can’t even remember most of them.

I’ve worked as a soccer referee, a pretend corpse in a haunted house, the Lead UX Designer for the international Dr. Oetker redesign, an artist at Miami Art Basel, a director presenting at the Venice Film Festival, the co-founder of a B2B marketing agency, a freelance creative technologist, blah blah blah. I’m all over the place; some may call it professional ADHD, but I attribute it to being extremely curious and wanting to understand how things work.

I’ve had the longstanding belief that multidisciplinarity and the ability to learn new skills is one of the most important “skills” we can have in today’s world. In 2019, for the educational boot camp iXperience, I gave a presentation titled “The Age of Reinvention” where I spoke about the importance of not only learning but also unlearning and the cruciality of adaptation. I have now realized it is time for me to adapt and learn once again.

Earlier this year, I was accepted into Columbia University’s Global Thought MA, where I will focus on global tech policy, specifically issues around AI and labor. This might seem like quite the leap, but to me, it feels like a natural next step. Let me explain.

I’ve always loved systems, it’s part of why I love working in UX. When you’re designing for UX, you’re truly developing an ecosystem where all pieces have their own purpose, while also acting in synchronicity. When I think about global politics and the systems of people, I know that they’re the greatest, most complicated, and most important systems out there. These systems affect us all in every aspect of our lives.

***

Last year, I was part of many panel talks, speaking about creative technology and AI. At a certain point, I started to feel that as essential as it was to share opinions with the community, it also started feeling a bit masturbatory. It’s similar to how I feel about social media. I think social media is an incredible tool for sharing information and gathering people/bringing awareness/circulating initiatives, but there is only so far it can go.

In my opinion, more creatives in our milieu need to get offline and work on getting into actual policy. It’s gross because politics are gross and politicians are gross. But until we actually have a seat at the table during conversations where laws are being made, we’re inadvertently trusting those “gross” politicians to make decisions that will deeply affect us. We need to take IRL actions that lead to material change, and strive to hold positions that directly impact laws and policies.

Many of us spend time making art about world issues, and art can be a powerful way to help change perspectives and shed light on important topics. But again, the only way material change will happen is when people representing us actually have our best interests at heart — and why shouldn’t those people be us?

***

In December 2022, I uploaded a post about AI, summarizing some of my thoughts regarding where technology is headed today. I wrote it after reflecting on the hype and FOMO culture around the Metaverse, NFTs, crypto, digital fashion, and other movements of that ilk. I felt that all these movements had been marketed as utopias — and to be fair, there were some benign and even positive actors in these spaces — but as these movements grew, they were co-opted and used to replicate real-world dynamics and act as new revenue streams for those with the power to participate, often large corporations.

This isn’t to say that these new technologies can’t benefit people. From 2020-2022, I was employed as the Principal Product Designer at neomento, a VR therapy company that uses fully customizable exposure therapy simulations to aid patients with anxiety disorders. I worked on designing the interface therapists use to run the simulated scenarios and guide their patients through them while monitoring their biometrics, eye movement, heartbeat, and more.

Working on this project felt like using both new technology and my own practice in a way that directly benefited others. I’d like to continue that trajectory, I’m just pivoting to approach it from a slightly different angle.

***

Almost every creative person I know is struggling right now. The creative industries are going through massive transformations and brands have become more fiscally conservative, not only because they’re future-proofing their profits, but because they can use new AI tools to skip the “middle-men” of junior and mid-weight creative workers.

In 2022, when Midjourney and Dall-e first launched, I felt like there was a lot of gaslighting towards creatives happening in the media. We were being told we were Luddites if we didn’t partake; that AI is just a tool and if we don’t hop on board, it’ll be our own fault that we’re left behind. We were told that this change is no different than the “jump” from painting to photography. This is all marketing used by AI companies to disregard the worries of creatives about financial security and push their products (which use creatives’ data btw), saving companies millions, and leaving creatives without previous sources of income.

At the time, I posed this question on social media: If every artist in the world switched to incorporating AI into their practice, do we really think that there will be paid creative work for each of us in five years? As we can already see, corporations behave as they always have: They try to gain as much revenue as possible while cutting costs as much as possible. A great example of this is when the National Eating Disorders Association of the USA (NEDA) fired nearly all of their human staff in favor of an AI chatbot named Tessa, which I wrote about in my AI Therapy Substack article. It’s the nature of capitalism and how companies function. Do we sincerely expect all the large corporations will simply hire us out of the goodness of their hearts?

Another way capitalism works: Those with wealth have more control than those without. And so in our AI future, those with large funds for lawyers will be able to battle AIs (and the companies creating and using said AIs) copying their work. In this post from 2022, I said, “I suspect that in AI-generated art and music, large artists like Beyonce and Taylor Swift, with powerful lawyers, will put a blocker on using their names, image, and work in public AI tools.” As for the rest of us without those lawyers? A recent story in Dazed by the model Nassia Matsa offers a glimpse into what is around the corner for most of us in the not-so-distant future.

Nassia writes about how an AI version of her face had been used (read: stolen) to represent an insurance company. She later saw another ad for the same insurance company that used an AI version of her friend. This will continue to happen, to an even more extreme degree as the technology advances. The inequities of the world will continue to be reflected in technology and will inevitably seep into the policies surrounding AI, unless those affected help shape future laws.

***

In the creative field, it is a privilege to not have social media. Having an online presence is crucial to finding clients and getting work — I’ve heard friends refer to Instagram as LinkedIn for designers and artists. Most creatives do not have the choice to not participate, though by participating, these companies “own” all of our data, and by way of that, they “own” our work. As third spaces continue to dwindle and become defunded in the real world, social media has become the new place for us to gather, share tools and information with each other, start initiatives, and organize. But there is only so far social media can go.

In a time when mass censorship continues to be on the rise, using social media as our main space for discussion becomes increasingly dangerous. Censorship of accounts due to content, often resulting in bans, has also been offloaded to AI bots, which often make mistakes, leaving the censored parties with little to no recourse. When trying to get help through these platforms for bans or censorship to one’s account, the user is also met with more AI chatbots put there to “help”.

For years, I’ve also been thinking about censorship on platforms and how it warps perspectives. For those who played the multi-player chatroom game Habbo Hotel, you might remember how if you typed out a swear word, it changed it to “bobba”. When we try to communicate something on the internet, the platform we use can change it to show something else to those interacting with our content, potentially without our knowledge; we might see it how we originally wrote it, never knowing it’s been changed for others. I see a future of mass censorship without knowing we are being censored.

Meta and other social media platforms are controlled, sterilized, and for-profit companies. They will always put profits above user preferences and needs. If we don’t like that fact, we can’t keep shouting into these platforms about it and think it will make a difference. What we need to do is change the policies that govern these platforms and cut off the rot from the source.

***

When I was about 24, I was going through a period of great difficulty and change. I was journaling for sometimes hours a day. During this time, I defined some guidelines for how I wanted to approach life. I said to myself that if there was ever a situation I didn’t like, I could do one of three things:

• I can leave the situation: Self-explanatory, but this means I can disengage and remove myself from the circumstance.
• I can accept the situation: This means making my peace with what I don’t like by practicing surrender to forces greater than myself.
• I can change the situation: Meaning that I can take the issue and tackle it head-on.

With AI and the way technology and global issues seem to be trending today, I can’t leave the situation. It affects my work, my life, and the life and work of not only my loved ones, but everyone in the world.

I also cannot accept the situation. I can’t accept that corporations will exploit the output of not only my artist friends, but of all of humanity — and charge money for it with no kickback to us. I can’t accept corporations growing increasingly more powerful and moving closer towards monopolization while the common person grows more desperate to make ends meet. I can’t accept the invasive and often illegal data practices that large social media platforms and corporations employ.

***

In this post from October 2023, I wrote about how I spoke to a man who worked in high-level fintech, and we were talking about an idea Sam Altman had proposed regarding the creation of a human verification system using people’s eyes. The fintech guy said he was adamantly against using bio-data as a login mechanism because that can only be stolen once and when it’s gone, it’s gone forever — you can never change your fingerprints or eyes. And yes, fingerprints can be turned into code and used by AIs.

The future of security with AI is one of the things that troubles me the most. Earlier this year, 23andMe had a large security hack, which led to the bio data of over seven million people being captured and sold. If, for example, health insurance companies in the US had access to this, they could raise premiums on people depending on their predisposition for certain conditions as shown in their genetic makeup, which is quite sinister. I think internet security and hacking is about to truly pop off, and we’re in for a hell of a ride.

With all of the above taken into account, according to my own principles, the only option I have left is to try to change the situation.*

I have another set of principles in my life that I developed around the same time as the previous ones (I told you, I like systems). These are three guiding keywords for how I like to approach “changing the situation”. These keywords are simplicity, efficiency, and purposefulness.

In an attempt to be purposeful and efficient when addressing these issues, I have decided to stay true to my overarching career as a slasher and pivot to this new step in my career and (try to) change the situation. I don’t know what opportunities will be open to me when I graduate, but I want to at least educate myself and help disperse that knowledge into our community.

AI is going to continue to develop whether we like it or not, so we may as well try to learn about it and do our best to shape it together, in a way that is both human-centered and sustainable.

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*Author’s note: To not use one of the aforementioned guidelines is to allow myself to reside in what I call “purgatory”. I define “purgatory” as a situation where something is uncategorizable in my head and lives in a state of ambiguity — where I am in a state of unrest or without peace, but without a way to move forward. Employing one of the above methods gives me a feeling of agency and the ability to dissolve that tension within myself and leave said purgatory.

Thank you Tabitha, for sharing this thoughtful personal manifesto with us. For more guest takeovers, head to our Journal.

Love,
Dinamo