Isabelle Levent
@isabellelevent
Isabelle Levent
@isabellelevent
In many instances, to say that some technologies are inherently political is to say that certain widely accepted reasons of practical necessity–especially the need to maintain critical technological systems as smoothly working entities–have tended to eclipse other sorts of moral and political reasoning.
They will shade our constant submissions to the vast digital commons, intentional or consensual or mandatory, with the knowledge that every selfie or fragment of text is destined to become a piece of general-purpose training data for the attempted automation of everything. They will be used on people in extremely creative ways, with and without
... See moreThe Lab’s mission is also to develop a critical literacy that can help cultural institutions approach AI technologies as advanced and multilayered media. While reliant on the highly specialised theoretical work needed to untangle issues such as ‘distributed authorship’ (Ascott 2005; Zeilinger 2021) involved in artistic research, the Lab does not
... See moreWhatever the size of the space, someone who comes up with a new idea within that thinking-style is being creative in the second, exploratory, sense. If the new idea is surprising not just in itself but as an example of an unexpected general type , so much the better.
Now none of this is meant to say that I think programmers, artists and engineers have no responsibilities when it comes to the outputs of machine learning models. In fact, I think we bear responsibility for everything these models do. (I never, for example, attribute authorship to a program or a model. If I publish the results of a text generator,
... See moreHowever, we often found that it was the unexpected differences between the prompt and the generated image’s interpretation of it that yielded new insight for and excitement from participants.