On Generative AI, the Crisis of Democratization, and Alternative Technological Imaginaries
Inspired by Antonio Gramsci's concept of the "Organic Intellectual," this research project proposes the figure of the "Organic Artist" — a non-specialist creative agent whose practice dissolves the boundaries between art and everyday life. Rooted in avant-garde traditions of deskilling and democratization, the project began as an inquiry into whether generative AI could serve this emancipatory vision. It has since become something more fundamental: a rethinking of what “the democratization of art” means at all.
The proliferation of generative AI has delivered a version of the democratization promise, namely, access to image, video, sound/music, and text production for anyone with an internet connection. However, what this access has generated is largely what critics now call "AI slop”; algorithmically generated content that flattens aesthetic distinctions and subordinates creative expression to platform logics of engagement and data extraction. This forces a return to the question itself: was democratization ever simply about access to tools? Or did it always imply something more — genuine creative agency, collective authorship, and art as a mode of making embedded in social life rather than absorbed by capital?
To pursue this, the project undertakes a structural critique of generative AI as a sociotechnical system. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler's theory of generalized proletarianization, Marx's concept of real subsumption, and analyses of cognitive capitalism, I intend to examine how generative AI reorganizes artistic labour — fragmenting creative agency into microtasks of prompt optimization, converting user output into unpaid training data, and accelerating the commodification of aesthetic practice within platform economies. Central to this analysis is an examination of the deterministic assumptions encoded in artificial neural networks, the colonial taxonomies reproduced through large-scale training datasets, and the techno-deterministic narratives that naturalize AI development as inevitable and neutral.
Against this "Cathedral of Computation," my research project draws on Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation to reframe AI as a relational technical object shaped by human practice and historical power, and on Yuk Hui's concept of techno-diversity to imagine AI development grounded in plural epistemologies rather than universal classification schemes.
Dina A. Mohamed is an artist, educator, and researcher based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her research and artistic practice span diverse interests, with a central focus on exploring political despondency arising from the entanglement of economics, politics, and information technology. She examines how individuals and communities can reclaim political agency within the deterministic logic of technology and the overflow of information and, crucially, how information can be transformed into knowledge.
Dina holds a BA in Philosophy from the American University in Cairo and an MA in Art Praxis from the Dutch Art Institute (ArtEZ). She is a critical practice tutor at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, and a guest lecturer at Leiden University. She has worked as an educational leader for the Dutch Art Institute and as a post-academic program curator for Basis Voor Actuele Kunst (BAK), Utrecht.
Her artistic work has been presented at festivals including Dancing on the Edge (Netherlands), Camden Fringe (London), Short Theatre Festival (Rome), Beyond the Black Box Festival (Amsterdam), Amsterdam Fringe Festival, and Over het IJ Festival (Amsterdam), among others. She is also the co-founder of the Amsterdam-based collective Fuck Healing (?). Her writings have appeared in Contemporary Art and Capitalist Modernization (Routledge, 2021, edited by Octavian Esanu) and are forthcoming in A Cut Through The Screen – Struggles' Reverberations in Cinema (Archive Books). Alongside her collective, she has contributed to the forthcoming volume Resistance, Activism and Health (Oxford University Press).