FAccT CRAFT: Leveraging humour, satire, and art to engage with the environmental impacts of AI
FAccT’25 CRAFT: Leveraging humour, satire, and art to engage with the environmental impacts of AI
Session Description: Our interactive CRAFT workshop session uses satire and creative expression to facilitate and strengthen collective organizing around the environmental damages caused by AI systems.
The JSD lab has developed a distributed satirical campaign to Savethe.AI which uses humour to connect individuals’ and communities’ needs for Earth’s resources with the evidence of just how much of these resources are now being claimed for the data centres running generative AI. By connecting our thirst with a data center’s cooling system, the campaign addresses psychological distance: it is very hard to relate personally to the distant data centers where generative AI models do their work.
In our CRAFT workshop session, we will build on the satirical angle and facilitate a creative humorous engagement with questions of individual agency, community experiences, and collective resistance. We collectively explore ecological and social impacts of data centers and platforms that are already felt by diverse communities. These impacts vary greatly in place and time and are documented primarily by the tireless work of organizers, civil society, and academics, while being obfuscated by the companies creating the situation.
Our workshop invites participants to collectively develop their own humorous ideas and materials that express the absurdity of those harms being taken for granted and denied.
Through this creative process, we hope to achieve both a collective learning process, foster a sense of collective agency, possibly develop visual materials that the community can use, and contribute to community building in the face of the issues of accountability, transparency, and ecological and social harms that result from rampant AI.