“AI for Ants: A zine about Small AI” invites you to reimagine what we could make with AI if scale wasn’t an objective. Drawing inspiration from the degrowth movement, climate justice, and low-tech, this zine weaves together 38 pages of creative provocations that investigate the concept of small AI

Small AI challenges the mainstream narratives of bigger-is-better, universality, and profit and power max-ing. It explores how we can cultivate a new relationship with technology that prioritizes the land, resources, and communities that sustain it by asking:

• How can we design and build ecologically sustainable AI?
• Who might benefit from a small AI approach?
• How have we internalized the ideas of profit, productivity, and progress in our approach to designing and building AI?
• What we could make with AI if scale was no longer an objective?

This zine is a hot compost pile of creative contributions, exchanges, and discussions from the Small AI Zine-making Workshop, hosted at The Sphere on July 21, 2024. It was compiled by internet teapot as part of the Slow AI project by AIxDESIGN.

A big thank you to all the workshop participants for their amazing contributions!

Nadia Nadesan, Leo Scarin, Cecilia Scolaro, Tara Monheim, Georgia Borissova, Nadia Piet, Jie Shen, Kwan Suppaiboonsuk, Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes

The Slow AI project seeks to unpack and reimagine alternative narratives for AI, moving beyond Silicon Valley ideologies. Inspired by countermovements like slow fashion and slow food, it aims to subvert corporate-first thinking by collectively exploring new perspectives as pathways to ‘imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within’ (Ruha Benjamin).

Small AI is one of three pathways designed to unpack and inspire alternative visions for AI. Discover the others too.