Event 3: LASER: Decolonizing AI

LASER: De-colonizing AI

On Thursday, June 1st, I attended a LASER Talks event on "Decolonizing AI". The Leonardo/ISAST LASER Talks program brings together people from various disciplines including art and science to give informal presentations about their work and "encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region". The talk focused on the western-centric development of AI and the potential for machines to inherit the same imperialism and colonialism present in many fields, even today.

Amir Baradaran is an augmented reality (AR)tist that discussed the impact of AI on the ecosystem, and more specifically, the art ecosystem. He cautioned about AI becoming the art or the artist but also encouraged the use of AI to help create and innovate. 

The talk I was most intrigued by, however, was by the Armenian writer and artist Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, who discussed the inheritance of historically discriminatory and euro-centric views by artificial intelligence. She used the example of the sexualization and violence against women embodied by Renaissance art, and the reproduction of similar themes by AI. 

As can be seen in Image 1, an Asian woman used AI to create a portrait of herself and not only did it adapt to the soft blurred features of women seen in European art, but it also made her look white. The undoubted reflection of discriminatory ideals in this and other artificially produced images is astonishing.

Image 1: Colonialism Reflected by AI

Hakopian further discussed the AI tool "Aician", which aims to "generate novel images(art) that do not follow established styles". However, as is shown in Image 2, the tool is trained almost exclusively using European and American artists, and produces art that resembles the outdated and homogenous representations of blurred portraits hung in gold frames, such as the portrait seen in Image 1.

Aican determines "art or not art" directly by proximity of the work to western works of art. Hakopian described this perpetuation of western ideals by AI as "the emergence of the powdered wig in the machine". Since the machine is trained using datasets that exclude non-white people, they cannot be represented in the art it produces.

 

Image 2: Western-Centric Datasets Used to Train Aican

Although artificial intelligence is associated with the ideas of unbiased production and technological advancements, it is often forgotten that they still derive from their surroundings. Many representations of art, although more recently diverging, center western ideals, and AI seems to continue the trend it observes. 

This makes me concerned about the lack of control we have on machine learning, and it saddens me that larger society continues to reflect the colonialist mindset we are attempting to correct. AI can be a useful tool for design, but only of it is trained using diverse datasets created by a diverse group of people, so it represents an ideal society we are trying to create, and not the one we have tried to change. 

Proof of Attendance

Proof of Comment

Works Cited

Arizona State University. “Laser Talks.” Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University, leonardo.info/laser-talks. Accessed 3 June 2023.

“Aican.” AICAN, www.aican.io/. Accessed 3 June 2023.

Lindquist, Sherry CM. “Confronting Power and Violence in the Renaissance Nude.” Getty Iris, 2 Nov. 2020, blogs.getty.edu/iris/confronting-power-and-violence-in-the-renaissance-nude/.

Hakopian, Mashinka. “About.” Mashinka Firunts, www.mashinkafirunts.com/about/. Accessed 3 June 2023.