Alum Trevor Paglen Featured in El País
From secret CIA prisons to the images that train AI, this article shares how alum Trevor Paglen looks where we cannot see.
From the article:
The one who warns of this twist in the dizzying evolution of AI is Trevor Paglen, who has been researching for years at the intersection where art and technology meet. “You might like the color blue and I might like the color green more, so you might have an image generated for you attached to an article that is designed to appeal to your preferences,” explains the conceptual artist on the terrace of the Matadero Madrid center, where he recently gave a talk entitled Machine Visions about the origin of AI, and where he has a video installation that can be visited until February 25. “And that’s just the basics,” he adds. “The types of media that tend to get traction on the internet are the ones that are very specifically designed to tug on our emotions and to manipulate us, and I think that generative AI opens up a world of possibility to do that that will make the Facebook and TikTok algorithms look very crude in comparison. I worry a lot about that,” he continues, and reflects: “There is a conspiracy theory that’s been very popular in the last 10 years or so, that we’re all living in a simulation, that nothing is real and everything is being manipulated for us. And I sometimes think, ‘Oh, that’s true.’”
Read more here!