Trevor Paglen in MIT Press Reader
BCNM alum Trevor Paglen reveals the unsettling biases and alienating effects of generative AI in The MIT Press Reader.
From the article:
Along with other works in Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations series (2017–ongoing), including the monstrous "Vampire (Corpus: Monsters of Capitalism)" and "Human Eyes (Corpus: The Humans)" — the latter complete with the apparition of deceptively unseeing eyes — "Rainbow" was produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN), an AI model that trains neural networks to recognize, classify and, crucially, generate new images. Given that AI image-processing models do not experience the world as we do, but rather replicate a once-removed and askew version of it, the images they produce reveal the degree to which AI computationally generates disquieting allegories of our world. Emerging from an embryonic space of automated image production, images such as "Rainbow" disclose that which is usually hidden or otherwise obscured — an apparition, or a nightmare, that is indebted to the hallucinatory, often erroneous logic of the algorithms that power AI. Often dismissed as a fault or glitch, this logic is nevertheless a fundamental aspect of AI, not merely a side effect.
Read more here!