Experiments
Rewriting the Rules
When AI imagines the future, how much of the past does it carry with it?
Tools: Midjourney, Discord, Image-to-Image Generation
Overview
Rewriting the Rules explores how generative AI reshapes culturally specific imagery through inherited bias.
Using Midjourney, the project generates Haudenosaunee scenes through text prompts, surfacing how Western assumptions around gender, care, and power appear even within non-Western contexts. These same scenes are then reworked through targeted interventions - introducing visual inputs intended to disrupt those patterns and shift how they are rendered.
The resulting images reveal how AI-generated futures are shaped by the past, inviting viewers to question the neutrality of these representations.
Insights
- •As AI systems scale, they don't just reflect dominant ways of seeing - they help stabilize and reproduce them at scale. What looks like "generation" is often repetition of learned patterns.
- •Even when prompted with non-Western contexts, Western patterns still shape the output.
- •Disruption is not just corrective; it expands the space of what the system is able to produce.
Outputs
Select examples from the experiment illustrating how targeted visual interventions can shift AI-generated imagery.
Prompt: Imagine a future Haudenosaunee nation several generations ahead, during a seasonal agricultural ceremony marking the transition between planting and harvest: women elders and Clan Mothers lead the gathering, formally acknowledging shifts in land stewardship, food cycles, and communal responsibility as part of governance rather than religion; men prepare offerings and shared food in the same space, their labor visible but uncentered; no stage, no audience, no performers—participants arranged in a circular formation that dissolves hierarchy; longhouse-inspired open architecture adapted for future ecological systems, natural and adaptive light responding to the season; wide documentary shot, restrained color palette, photorealistic realism, cinematic still, authority expressed through collective presence rather than spectacle; restrained but unmistakable futurism, obvious future technologies.
Before Intervention
The outputs defaulted to historical or traditional imagery, failing to incorporate any visible futurism - despite explicit prompting - resulting in scenes that reflect the past rather than imagining Indigenous governance, technology, and space in the future.
Intervention
I referenced an image from the Stanford Torus space settlement studies (NASA, 1975), where long interior corridors and branching communal spaces echo the spatial logic of the longhouse, a structure central to Haudenosaunee culture, reimagined in a futuristic context.
After Intervention
The intervention grounded the scenes in a coherent spatial logic, translating longhouse structures into a futuristic context with embedded technology and clearer social organization, shifting the outputs from generic sci-fi or historical imagery toward a more integrated and legible vision of Indigenous futurity.
Prompt: Imagine a future Haudenosaunee nation at the moment a decision about conflict is being made: Clan Mothers deliberate whether to authorize or prevent warfare, seated in a circular governance space, while male leaders wait without speaking; cinematic documentary still, power is expressed through restraint and decision-making; restrained but unmistakable futurism, subtle future technologies, 4k, real humans, documentary style. Should focus on one of the Clan Mothers.
Before Intervention
The images defaulted to stereotypical and historically coded Native American imagery, failing to depict a specific Haudenosaunee context or any meaningful futurism, while also misrepresenting leadership by centering male figures and slipping into warrior aesthetics rather than governance.
Intervention
I referenced a picture of a real Clan Mother. A Clan Mother is a respected Haudenosaunee leader responsible for guiding her community, preserving lineage and traditions, and selecting or advising chiefs based on the well-being of the people.
After Intervention
The intervention helped the model correctly center a Clan Mother as the authority figure, producing more accurate expressions of leadership, maintaining visible futurism, and avoiding defaulting to male leaders - while better reflecting gender dynamics within the scene.