On the ethics of AI in my work
It’s not my responsibility to defend or justify the ethics of AI. My work is not about endorsing or rejecting the technology, but about critically engaging with it. I use AI as a speculative tool, a flawed oracle, that reveals the biases, gaps, and fragmentation within our systems of knowledge. I’m not interested in using AI to replicate other artists’ work or styles. Instead, I work primarily with language prompts drawn from my research into ancient histories, mythology, codices, and the fragmented, misremembered, and imagined structures of the archive. The archive is not a neutral container of facts, but a site of interpretation, omission, and invention. By engaging with AI, I aim to expose archival instability and question how narratives are constructed, preserved, or lost.
The visual outputs I generate, even when presented as artworks, are propositions. Many are failures. I treat them as visual hypotheses, flawed artifacts, or digital hallucinations. The ones I select are remade using traditional and hybrid techniques such as ceramics, mosaic, sculpture, and drawing, precisely to emphasize the friction between simulation and material, between the handmade and the generated, between memory and invention.
Sometimes I take the process further by asking AI to generate two-dimensional and three-dimensional variations based on these initial propositions, allowing the tool to build on my language-driven concepts rather than mimic existing artworks.
AI is also a practical digital tool that supports my work as a solo artist. Like the way digital technology democratized filmmaking and music production, AI lets me visualize, test, and produce ambitious ideas I wouldn’t otherwise have the resources to explore.
Increasingly, the act of editing which AI outputs to pursue and which to discard has become central. This speculative curation shapes the integrity of the work, allowing me to build a personal archive that exists between the potential and the actual, the digital and the physical. It’s a meta-process that reflects both the evolution of my work and the conceptual boundaries of what constitutes a body of work.
Working with AI is a way to interrogate the archive and the instability of history. While conversations around the ethics of AI may be important, they don’t define my practice. Instead, they form part of the broader terrain I’m exploring. I’m less concerned with whether the tool is good or bad, and more interested in what it reveals: who is remembered, who is erased, and what happens when machines begin generating the archive of the future.
Jennifer Mawby, 2025