Category: Deliverables-08

minniebzrg-facereadings

  1. It was sort of alarming that clearview.ai gathered over 3 billion images from public databases such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to use for their facial recognition program. This means photographs from when I was a reckless teenager posting all of my daily activities are probably in their database.
  2.  Algorithmic bias exists even in the judicial system. For example, a judge could decide how long an individual be imprisoned for based on machine learning.
  3. Instead of changing society or people, the better answer would be to go back and rewire the foundations of programming to remove any biases. It also matters whose hands these programs fall into.

shrugbread-facereadings

I found the clearview.ai coverage very interesting. Scraping the bottom of the barrel of the internet to identify every instance of an individual was scary, but also scary in a way where the worst of it can only be left up to our imagination. If a project like clearview.ai exists and comes under great scrutiny, then who is to say that they haven’t done more nefarious things unchecked, or a competitor to it has not.

I also found interesting the point made in the article “Against black inclusion in facial recognition” that law enforcement doesn’t need more tools to identify, surveil, and subsequently oppress black people. Treating facial recognition more as a time-bomb prompt to explode in the faces of oppressed people.

rathesungod- 08- LookingOutwards

Daniel Ambrosi, Infinite Dreams (2020).

After looking at the dozens of pieces featured on these websites, I ultimately chose this piece because of how it made me feel. Lately, within my art practice and just looking art, I forget how much your feelings can be emulated by color, texture, tone, etc. First looking at this piece, I suddenly got a such a familiar and warm feeling that reminded me of a certain summer night that has had a really big impact on me.

Obviously the colors really caught my eye at first, but looking further into the piece, you can really see the impact of the details within each square. I almost just feel as if I want to live in that world of cubes and colorful squares like a maze.

minniebzrg-Looking Outwards: AI + Art

Visualizing High-Dimensional Spaces

by Daniel Smilkov, Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg & the Big Picture team

In high-dimensional spaces, this project visualizes data sets. In order to organize a variety of characteristics about people, objects, words, and more, machine learning converts these into data points that are organized in a high-dimensional space. I found this project interesting because it is an applicable and foundational program that could be used for people beyond the art and science fields. A variety of data sets can be explored using this system. The program utilizes pixel recognition which is then clustered by the machine. I find it interesting that the machine is learning something about each item or object that is then used for others to learn.

shrugbread-08-Looking Outwards

Above is an image from the project “Fooling Facial Detection with Fashion” by Bruce MacDonald. The goal of the project was to create an adversarial to the “histogram of oriented gradients” method of facial tracking. Because our faces are constantly being scanned many people have invested effort into “protecting” themselves from the constant surveillance. This project exists as a small novel experiment in the very real context of adversarial attacks and reminds me particularly of deep fake detectors and deep fake detector breakers. The slightly scary idea that if you provide enough images of your face, something we present to our phone cameras near-daily, that your identity, privacy, individuality, can be compromised. We are still in the infancy of what surveillance technology can do, and while paranoid, this project gives me a feeling of dystopia where there is no corner of the earth where you can escape being viewed, and to protect ourselves we have to fool an AI  that we created.

bumble_b – GPT2

1. (I’m so sorry, I just thought this would be funny lol.) “Golan Levin’s horrible class is having its end-of-term exam tomorrow.

Torture.

The class is trying to convince him that, given a choice, he would rather have his hands broken.

Meanwhile, between sessions, they’re all heading out to a bar called Izmir to meet up with the girls and gossip.

It’s amazing that he’s not going to be in mortal terror when he arrives.

How do these people keep so calm?

After all, they’re crammed into a tiny, stifling cellar with each other, listening to a philosophy teacher pontificate on the”

2. “I hope I die at 55.

I want to die at 55, die completely, die fighting, I want to die.

Then I heard again from this voice who first told me I would die soon.

He’s the one I called the voice that wrote me a love letter.

He said he wanted me to live, that I should live.

His point was that I can do anything I want to do and be anyone I want to be.

I believe him, but then I was made to feel guilty.

I went back to smoking cigarettes for 2 weeks and it was horrible.

I felt horrible.

I was depressed, sick.”

3. “There’s nothing left of him that I would want anyone else to see.

He died for me.

That is the only true thing that has to matter.

I’d rather be completely alone than have another one of these people in my life who allow themselves to be used by the enemy for vengeance.

I don’t have any expectations that people I call friends will join me in mourning or find me funny when I’m in tears.

That’s not how life works.

But what I do expect, and what I will always expect, is that when I need a friend, that person will”

Reflection: Okay, wow this was fun! The second and third ones I generated were so weirdly poetic and dark. I love that the generator was capable of going there. I thought the first one was really funny, though. When it generated the single-word sentence “Torture.” I seriously laughed out loud. All jokes, of course!!

 

bumble_b – DeepNostalgia

Firstly, I thought this was incredibly uncomfortable and creepy – straight out of uncanny valley for me.

I used a photo of myself first and thought it did a pretty decent job, creepiness aside. It grabbed a little bit of hair from the person next to me, but overall, it looks kind of cool.

After that, I tried doing some characters from animated movies because of the examples we saw in class about animating artwork. I figured if it worked on art, it would work on a cartoon… but I was very wrong. It wouldn’t detect a face.

So, I decided to use one of my favorite photos of Monica Geller, my favorite character from my favorite TV show! These are the results… again, weird and creepy.

bumble_b – ArtBreeder

I’m not gonna lie, I had kind of a hard time understanding how in the world to use this, so I spent a lot more than the allotted time trying to figure it all out, but I have a bunch of random stuff to show for it.

Messing with prayer rugs, churches, and comic books was soooo cool to me, so these are definitely my favorite images: