Chromatic Disruption
Resource depletion has forced an international ban on building new data centers, making the existing ones worth fighting over. In Eindhoven, Meta and the Umbrella Corporation (the one from Resident Evil) spend three months contesting control of the Dutch National Data Center. After winning, Meta strips its AI models of the ability to perceive the color red. In doing so, Umbrella Corporation, whose logo is red and white, will be demoted in suggestions and placement in the Netherlands. The consequences of Meta’s actions extend beyond the corporate world. Autonomous vehicles crossing into the Netherlands stop reading traffic lights and stop signs. Medical imaging degrades, blood tests are misread, diagnoses start going wrong.
The story came out of a question about what happens when models are tampered with after they are deployed and deeply engrained in society. It was written with Arganka Yahya; we used ChatGPT to generate prose that we then edited.
Chromatic Disruption was made during a one-day workshop as part of the 2023 Design and AI Symposium at TU Delft. During the workshop, we produced a complete fictional issue of ACM’s Interactions magazine — dated July–August 2043, themed “’20s AI Fever Nostalgia,” and written as a retrospective on the period we are currently living through. The workshop was organized by Dave Murray-Rust, Philip van Allen and Maria Luce Lupetti. Other contributors include: Michele Wells-de Vos, Lavanya Siri, Liesbeth Oltmans, Jingrui An, George Profitiliotis, and Quian.