Lenny Martinez

Chromatic Disruption

design fiction, 2023

Pages 6–7 of the fictional July–August 2043 issue of Interactions. The left page is a Blog@IX article titled “Chromatic Disruption: Eindhoven’s Tech Titans Clash Over AI and Red Perception” by Arganka Yahya and Lenny Martinez, set in three columns with a green pull quote: “Meta decided to strip AI of its ability to perceive the color red.” The right page is a generated image of a red sports car speeding down a wet street between glass towers, with red light streaking past.

Chromatic Disruption is a news story from a fictional 2043 issue of ACM’s Interactions magazine. After a ban on new data centers, Meta wins control of the Dutch National Data Center from the Umbrella Corporation (the one from Resident Evil) and strips its AI models of the ability to see red, which is Umbrella’s brand color. Autonomous cars entering the Netherlands stop reading traffic lights, and blood tests start being misread. Arganka Yahya and I wrote it using ChatGPT to ask what happens when deployed models are tampered with after society depends on them.

Made at the AI Design Futures Charrette 2023, a one-day workshop at TU Delft organized by Maria Luce Lupetti, Dave Murray-Rust, and Philip van Allen. The full issue was presented to a panel of AI experts at the 2023 Design and AI Symposium.