CRAiEDL Project: I’m Honoured To Serve.

I’m Honoured To Serve explores the insidious guise of digital environments made to generate user data in a way to profit from the unsuspecting user. Through this multi-media installation, we attempt to make visible the implicit conventions that are imposed on users while being manipulated into data-giving unpaid labourers. With the permeation of AI in society, we have become complacent in volunteering our labour through the commercialization, popularization and glamorization of consumer tech that creates the illusion of capability and power.

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While this modern technology holds up the facade of an adept, powerful, and neutral tool meant to serve the user the technology we interact with is always embedded with values, character traits, and fictional backgrounds to create a marketable product with a personality. It functions less as a neutral tool with advanced capabilities and more as a product embedded with opaque motives operating behind a facade not clearly understood by the user.

Presented in a staged office space, I’m Honoured To Serve uses the language of advertising and design to bring viewers back in time to the late 20th century where there was hope, excitement, and the promise of freedom by tech developers.

We aim to uncover this illusion with Maeve, an Digital AI Assistant that functions as a disjointed and aloof character, manifesting the jarring reality of personalizing technology