Canadian artist and educational Sandra Rodriguez, by hacking synthetic intelligence, hopes to demystify the novel know-how topping the information of late, whereas showcasing its energy and potential to brighten but additionally disrupt our lives.
In a dimly lit Montreal art area, guests work together together with her exhibit – an AI educated on hundreds of thousands of on-line searches for erotica that generates a mosaic of grownup movies that ultimately mesh right into a soup of summary shapes.
Skin is proven as “uniformly mild” and “clean,” reflecting “what the AI sees most in present grownup movies,” explains Rodriguez, who used a number of generative algorithms to create the photographs that spotlight “the social biases which exist in mass pornography.”
A couple of months earlier, she had unveiled a conversational bot impressed by American linguist Noam Chomsky whose goal was to “demystify the secrets and techniques of AI” by chatting with the general public, all in a digital world.
“It is important at the moment to create works of art that talk to the general public about points that may have an effect on them tomorrow,” says Rodriguez, including she goals to dispel fears, in addition to the “considerably unrealistic craze,” surrounding AI.
“Sandra is a little bit of a hacker in a sure method,” says Gauthier Gidel, who has collaborated on a number of of her tasks and is a researcher at Mila, the bogus intelligence institute of Quebec.
“She will take the tools, attempt to change up their use and present the world that this twisted use is sort of higher than the preliminary purpose for which they have been created,” he explains.
An individual walks via an synthetic intelligence (AI) exhibition by Rodriguez referred to as ‘Sex, Desire And Data’ on the Centre Phi in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Photo: AFP
For her subsequent challenge, the 40-something Rodriguez plans to combine synthetic intelligence with dance, a ardour she has had since her childhood in Montreal the place she realized salsa at neighborhood events.
From documentaries to AI art
Born to a Spanish humanitarian assist employee and a Quebec instructor, Rodriguez grew up in an immigrant neighbourhood in Montreal earlier than spending a part of her youth overseas.
Attending secondary college in Spain, college in Canada after which in Belgium, “it was vital for our mother and father that we be uncovered to different methods of pondering, different cultures,” says the artist whose older sister lives in Madrid.
Initially educated in documentary cinema, she shortly used rising digital media to seek out “new methods of telling human tales.”
At the identical time, she developed a course of analysis on methods during which the general public can reappropriate new tech tools and the ensuing social impacts.
For seven years, she break up her time between Montreal and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the place she taught the primary course dedicated to the manufacturing of immersive media.
Today, a number of of her works embody this duality and have earned award nods at festivals together with Sundance and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.
‘An actual hazard’
Rodriguez has a powerful “need to interrupt the bounds (of those applied sciences) and to go beyond them, however in an clever method, to carry worth,” says Eliane Achcar of Studio Normal.
For the artist, know-how via completely different lenses helps to disclose its flaws.
By relying solely on content material collected on the web and on their very own creations, generative AIs like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion that flip textual content prompts into photos scale back “little by little creativity and the mind-set in another way,” says Rodriguez.
Added to that is the query of plagiarism of the works on which these methods are based mostly – an problem raised by a number of artists earlier than the courts.
“We have to take breaks within the growth of AI,” says Rodriguez, who has denounced the huge assortment of knowledge for a number of years. “Not a lot as a result of the methods are transferring too quick, however as a result of we do not know who’s utilizing them, what knowledge they’re utilizing.”
In 2015 Rodriguez was recognised for her work highlighting abuses by know-how firms within the “DoNotObserve” challenge, a documentary sequence produced by worldwide media.
“There is an actual hazard for us as residents,” she warns. – AFP
