Boris Debackere

FUTURE MANIFESTOS – Konferanse
DIGS, Krambugata 2 / 10. & 11. APRIL, 10:00 – 14:30
Gratis inngang.
Kurator: Zane Cerpina

The Critical AI Manifesto

Boris Debackere

A spectre is haunting our information society—the spectre of artificial intelligence. Two things result from this fact. (I) AI is already acknowledged by all post-industrial powers to be a power in itself. (II) It is high time the digital creative class openly, in the face of the whole world, published their views, aims, and tendencies, and met this nursery tale of the spectre of AI with a manifesto of the creative industry itself. 

Let’s wind up the nursery tale of AI, join the United Intelligence Lab. We are writing The Critical AI Manifesto! Anyone is welcome, except for AI. Founded at V2_, The United Intelligence Lab, considers AI the most transformative technology of our time, shaping how we interact, create, and think. With an ever-growing community of members from all walks of life, we are exploring AI’s impact on culture and society. Whether AI-dominion is something you secretly yearn for or desperately hope to escape from, one thing is certain. The old vantage points on AI will no longer suffice for anyone. 

Manifestos that critique new media emerge when technological systems become culturally invisible yet structurally dominant. From the polemical force of The Communist Manifesto to the perceptual shocks of the avant-garde, manifestos have historically exposed the hidden conditions of production and experience. In digital and AI-driven media, they shift from ideological declarations to infrastructural critique, revealing how platforms, algorithms, and data flows shape perception and behaviour. Contemporary manifestos aim to function as situated disruptions within evolving media ecologies.

But to what avail? Media critique once aimed to reveal the concealed workings of systems and ideology, but it now risks becoming just another genre within the very structures it intends to scrutinise. Circulating as content, indexed, liked, and platformed, critique is increasingly metabolised as signal rather than rupture. The act of unveiling has become aestheticised and predictable: a rhetoric of exposure without consequence, a loop of knowingness that confirms rather than unsettles. In the age of AI, where systems learn from critique just as much as from compliance, opposition is no longer external but already folded into the training set. Therefore, what must be questioned is not only the naiveté of technological optimism but also the comfort of adopting a posture of critique. A manifesto, if it is to matter, must risk ineffectiveness to avoid capture and must act where critique alone has become indistinguishable from the noise it diagnoses.