Montreal (AFP) – Demystifying artificial intelligence (AI) by diverting its use is the mission given to Sandra Rodríguez, a Canadian researcher and artist who manages to immerse the public in her works to raise awareness about the power of this new technology.
First modification: 01/19/2024 – 15:23 Last modification: 01/19/2024 – 15:21
2 min
In the dark, visitors interact with the walls that surround them. When they get close, an AI trained on millions of searches for erotic images on the web generates a mosaic of pornographic videos that evolve to present abstract shapes.
The skins are “uniformly light” and “smooth”, reflecting what the model “sees most often in current pornographic videos”, explains the artist, who created a system that uses several generative AI platforms that produce images from texts. , like Stable Diffusion. Her goal: “Highlight the social deviations that exist in mass pornography.”
A few months ago, Rodríguez presented in Montreal a conversation robot inspired by the famous American linguist Noam Chomsky, whose goal is to “demystify the secrets of AI” through discussions with the public.
“It is necessary to create works of art that speak to the public about the challenges that they will face tomorrow,” says the creator, who seeks to dispel “fears” but also “the somewhat unrealistic passions” about the new technology.
A visitor to the AI exhibition titled “Sex+Desires+Data”, in Montreal, August 8, 2023. © ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP
“Sandra is, in a way, a hacker,” says Gauthier Gidel of Mila (Quebec’s artificial intelligence institute).
“Human stories”
The daughter of a Spanish father and Canadian mother, Rodríguez grew up in a cosmopolitan neighborhood of Montreal and lived part of her life outside of Canada.
Artist Sandra Rodriguez poses for a portrait during an IA exhibition on August 8, 2023 © ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP
Trained in documentary film, she quickly turned to new digital media, such as virtual reality and AI, as a way to “find new paths to tell human stories.”
In addition, it develops a research course on how the public appropriates these new tools and the social impacts that are generated.
For seven years he lived between Montreal and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, where he taught production in immersive media, which tries to reproduce reality in the digital universe.
Another way of thinking
Rodríguez “has the will to break the limits” of these technologies “and overcome them, but in an intelligent way, to enrich,” commented Eliane Achcar, creative director of Normal Studio, which collaborates with the artist.
AI that generates images from text “little by little reduces creativity and the way of thinking differently,” he believes. Added to this is the controversial issue of plagiarism of works, a problem reported by several artists before the courts.
“We must take pauses in the development of AI,” considers Sandra Rodríguez, who has denounced massive data collection for years. The problem “is not so much that the systems go too fast, but that we do not know who uses them, what data they use.”
“There is a real danger for us as citizens,” the artist warned.
© 2024 AFP
2024-01-19 14:31:54
#algorithms #Sandra #Rodríguez #artist #merges #art
