philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Black Artists Say A.I. Shows Bias, With Algorithms Erasing Their History

... Dinkins ran into similar problems with NFTs that she created and sold showing how okra was brought to North America by enslaved people and settlers. She was censored when she tried to use a generative program, Replicate, to make pictures of slave ships. She eventually learned to outwit the censors by using the term “pirate ship.” The image she received was an approximation of what she wanted, but it also raised troubling questions for the artist.

“What is this technology doing to history?” Dinkins asked. “You can see that someone is trying to correct for bias, yet at the same time that erases a piece of history. I find those erasures as dangerous as any bias, because we are just going to forget how we got here.”

Naomi Beckwith, chief curator at the Guggenheim Museum, credited Dinkins’s nuanced approach to issues of representation and technology as one reason the artist received the museum’s first Art & Technology award.

“Stephanie has become part of a tradition of artists and cultural workers that poke holes in these overarching and totalizing theories about how things work,” Beckwith said. The curator added that her own initial paranoia about A.I. programs replacing human creativity was greatly reduced when she realized these algorithms knew virtually nothing about Black culture.

But Dinkins is not quite ready to give up on the technology. She continues to employ it for her artistic projects — with skepticism. “Once the system can generate a really high-fidelity image of a Black woman crying or smiling, can we rest?”

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/04/arts/design/black-artists-bias-ai.html