AI Infused is a Work of Art

Author: Joaquin Melara

Editorial Contributions:
Benjamin Paul Rode, Garima Gujral, Sruthi Radhakrishnan, and Stratos Kontopoulos

Spotlighting domain experts, AI tools, and emerging startups that are translating Artificial Intelligence into real-world applications across critical industries.

Thanks for reading the first edition of AI Infused, this is the kick-off that will lead you, the reader, into a torrent of narratives around AI.

Before venturing forward into the first edition of AI Infused, here are some of the main ideas we are going to cover, among other things.

At the start of 2025, Sruthi Radhakrishan and Joaquin Melara were chatting about how to productively collaborate to contribute something that benefited society in the field of AI. Writing something was what they determined would be a good idea. However, how much writing, about what, and who was to be involved became a subject of rich discussion. They decided it would be a good idea to write a recurring newsletter that showcased domain experts, different kinds of AI tooling, and emerging startups that are harnessing the power of AI into real-world applications across critical industries. They threw a number of names at the wall like a pot of wet spaghetti to see what would stick, and eventually landed on the name AI Infused.

For the first edition, they thought it would be cool to bring attention to women who were doing excellent work across the spectrum of STEAM (Science Technology Ethics Arts Mathematics). And although everything started out with good intentions… they quickly realized that they had gathered more contributions than they knew what to do with… 38 to be exact. So, they decided to pivot by coalescing the various submissions of stories and essays into one unified body of work; a digital book called AI Infused: Women in AI. They ended up releasing the independently produced digital book by August 2025. Since then, the publication has been accessed 1127 times.

For a three-person team (including Nadia Lenz, the fabulous graphic designer) with no prior publishing experience, releasing an independently produced digital book within months was an ambitious and deeply rewarding milestone.

At the heart of all this work sits the intention of bringing together a sense of community with readers, and more specifically practitioners that are seeking to deepen their understanding and mastery over their respective craft using different AI technologies. As you may be able to relate, when you engage in a journey of learning through trial-and-error, it can sometimes feel deeply isolating and lonely when you do not have other people to talk with about the terminology, methods, and learnings from the work you are doing. There is no one to talk to that has shared this experience. 

That feeling seemingly is compounded. The higher you move up in your career, the harder it becomes to find spaces for open dialogue if you are not actively cultivating a sense of community with like-minded people. After all, having someone outside of work that can serve as a sounding board to your concerns, serve as a model or example of what it means to be a high achiever, or even just to open up the door of possibilities through stories you feel you can relate to is what being part of a community is all about. It is a verb. It is a state of being. It is an ongoing dialogue that does not account for time.

To further highlight the problem individual practitioners face, the moment they step outside of their door… or open their phone or laptop, they are inundated with a tsunami of advertisements. Often flattening and distorting reality to sell technologies and tools that may or may not solve your actual problems. Without strong media literacy and a nuanced understanding of what goes into developing and governing AI systems, it becomes difficult to discern between a sound promise based on hard science and a cloud of smoke meant to trap you in a multi-year engagement with a poor product/ service provider. The real danger is when hype induces a manic buying behavior in the collective, that drives organizations into wildly misinformed investments, like buffalo stampeding off the edge of a cliff. 

AI Infused is a work of art. It is an expression of tacit knowledge in a narrative format that contextualizes heavy verbiage in real-world context. People with lived experience are writing and analyzing every word, negotiating meaning and clarity with taste and humor. Each article that springs forth is a portal into a thought bubble in a series of conversations. We invite you to weigh out the words and reason what they mean to you in your world and context.

We all learn something new through the act of sharing and transferring these experiences, and knowledge multiplies as a result. In a similar spirit to the way that engineers working with physical materials share insightful methods for manipulating physical matter, we will share with you ways of working with knowledge and logic to convert the chaos of the world into a well-orchestrated way to design responsible systems that take into consideration social, technical, and cultural elements that meet the demands of the real-world.

Without consideration for designing and implementing human-centered systems we would be devoid of meaning, or utility, or moral goodness. We will not be able to transition into leveraging AI beyond checking horoscopes or pocket psychologists without consideration for what these technologies can do to us, our children, and our society. We also need participation from all seven continents (yes, even the penguins should have a say), not just the imposition of western thought and representation. 

One key thing found through academic research and other avenues of learning about AI technology is that we are lacking in the basic format that we have relied on for thousands of years of human existence. We are missing a narrative format. We have learned about history, heroes and villains through stories. From fables, to comic books, to movies, to what we share at the dinner table… our brains are built as receptacles for stories. AI Infused is paying mind to this by putting you in the driver's seat of what are lived experiences through analysts and practitioners that have been at the heart of technology, and have been through the trenches.

The creative director, editor, and team of writers are all intimately involved within the realm of applying technology in the real-world. This is not a group of armchair science fiction writers wishfully describing things from their imagination. This is a distillation of lived experience to be shared and multiplied with the readers of the newsletter. 

We are going to leverage these lived experiences, and reinforce these stories with additional anecdotes and evidence found through other reputable resources which provide context you can explore further. Each newsletter article will include commentary and contributions from 2-3 people at any given time, and have links to additional actions you can take. 

Ultimately, we want to grow and mature the practice of leveraging AI technologies in a way that is beneficial to society. This technology is too powerful to be disproportionately distributed in unequal ways. We have to incorporate diverse, interdisciplinary perspectives from people around the world to create a vision for a future that represents all of our respective interests. We don’t want a small subset of people making decisions for everyone else, or have us fight over illusions of scarce resources (e.g. global north versus global south). 

By experimenting and sharing stories, and developing a shared understanding of AI technologies, and their responsible, human-centered uses we hope to create the change we want to see in the world. And by extension, we invite you to participate in AI Infused and the SWARM Community’s varied media / event productions. 

We cannot possibly fathom doing this kind of work in isolation, so if you are interested to participate as an active contributor or as a patron, we invite you to stay tuned with further developments of AI Infused and all upcoming independent series created through this platform. We invite analysts, deep explorers, and tinkerers actively applying these technologies in the real-world to write to us so we can start a conversation. 

There are three things that make use different in AI Infused:

To stay true to the three principles that make us different, we want to kickstart this dialogue with you, our lovely reader. We would love to get your perspective around the following questions:

To contribute to the newsletter, please fill out the following google form:

Your responses will help shape future editions, guide the topics we investigate, and inform the kinds of conversations we facilitate. 

And if you would like to be deeper involved in a community of practitioners navigating the responsible adoption of AI technologies, feel free to visit swarmcommunity.org to access resources and / or book a call to join the SWARM community.