They are locking the black boxes: critical AI studies and the history of seeing

Our article traces how critical questions about AI emerged from artistic practice. It argues that machine vision, historically the central example of AI, must be understood as historically and culturally situated. Using the algorithm CLIP, we show how AI models generate their own “optical strata”. As contemporary systems become increasingly closed black boxes, we argue that the scientific field must develop new methodological tools to analyse and contextualise them.