Alice Moloney

ALICE MOLONEY

Alice Moloney is a strategist and advisor championing alternative paths for how we build and live with technologies like AI. Bridging creative and engineering communities, she directs narratives, research, prototypes, and experiences that bring the human side of technology into view.

Modes of working

Creative strategy for projects that explore the societal impacts of emerging technologies and projects that connect creative and technical communities. Specialising in making visually-rich outputs with interdisciplinary teams.

Advisory for institutions, organisations, and companies navigating AI-driven change and what it means for their field and their futures by helping them to work out what to do next.

Mentorship to mothers in creative or tech industries on a 1:1 basis, who want to strengthen their sense of personal and professional identities during times of transition.

Image by Farah Al Qasimi, from Alternative Images of AI

Background

I have always been a researcher at heart. Even as a practicing illustrator, I was constantly drawn to complex subjects that required hours of digging and exploring. While art directing thousands of digital stickers for Google messaging products from 2015-17, I realised there are moments in life (like losing a loved one) when technology can really fail people. I wanted to better understand why this happens and how it can be avoided. So I joined Google Research in 2017 to interrogate how human emotion is perceived and processed by technology, and what digitising expression means for how we connect in person.

That led to me directing interdisciplinary projects on the societal impacts of AI, across domains like affective computing, digital safety, and the ethics of artificial agents. Managing senior creative teams, I worked with engineers, scientists, policy-makers, and artists to turn complex questions into work that shaped company policy and strategy. Throughout it all, what I loved most was making the human side of these technologies visible—bringing a perspective that opened up conversations and ideas that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Image by Max Pinckers, from Alternative Images of AI

One of my favourite projects to date has been Alternative Images of AI, which I initiated and directed. The goal was to explore new visual vocabularies to describe AI through speculative photography and spark conversations about how emerging technologies are changing the way we live and relate to each other.

The artwork was exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New York, where we hosted a panel between the three artists we commissioned and critic Fred Ritchin on how AI can be depicted visually and how it's changing the nature of photography. Fred reflected at the end that it was something he rarely sees: a tech company and a cultural institution actually talking together about the future of imaging, rather than staying in separate corners. That made my day!

Alternative Images of AI exhibition and event at the International Center of Photography

In 2021, long before generative AI was in everyone's hands, I collaborated with Nord Projects and Google Brain colleagues, Been Kim and Emily Reif, on two prototypes that explored how to express subjective concepts like moods and tones to AI using images alone. With a background in visual communication, this project was a dream to work on because we were really pushing the role of images to open up new ways for people to interact with technology.

A tool called Mood Board Search that lets you train an AI to find nuance in imagery. Image by Nord Projects

Mood Board Search and CAVcamera were both built on cutting-edge research, surfacing common threads across images and letting people try on each other's ways of seeing. I then took the prototypes back inside Google as research probes, pushing engineering and UX teams to think differently about "ground truth" in the machine learning pipeline and what it means to design for concepts where there’s no single right answer.

Explainer about Mood Board Search on Experiments with Google

I was out on my first maternity leave when generative AI exploded. Industries were changing rapidly, especially creative ones, and the shifts were directly affecting people I care about in both worrying and interesting ways. They still are. In a matter of months, what had often felt like speculative research—anticipating risks and imagining possibilities—was suddenly real and everywhere. It struck me that this was the moment to work across industries: to collaborate directly with the people and institutions navigating massive change, not only from inside tech.

Image by Charlie Engman, from Alternative Images of AI

Talks & Writing

Google Keyword article about Alternative Images of AI
BBC Four Thought episode on Digital Sadness about the difficulty of expressing negative emotions in the digital realm. Recorded live to an audience of 300 people at Shambala Festival and aired on Radio 4
Keynote speaker at Pictoplasma NYC conference to an audience of over 500 people about ‘Creating Stickers at Google’
Pecha Kucha speaker at VaroomLab Visionaries conference on ‘How do we champion the mavericks and pioneers of the illustration industry?’
It’s Nice That article: Should Illustrators Be Treated Like Designers?
Varoom Issue 31 article: A New Breed

Selected Press

Forbes: Google Challenges Artists To Defy AI Cliches, With Striking Results
The Atlantic: A New Lens on AI
TimeOut: The best museum exhibitions in NYC right now
CTO Magazine: AI Through an Artist’s Lens: Google’s Challenge to Rethink Technology’s Impact

Contact

Based in London. Get in touch at alicemoloney@gmail.com