Event 4

The event I attended was LASER: De-colonizing AI. I was particularly interested in Mashinka Hokapian's presentation. Hakopian is a writer, artist, and researcher. She is an Associate Director of Research for the Future of Democracy program at the Berggruen Institute. She is currently working on a book project that considers the role of ancestral intelligence and diasporic worldmaking in emerging technologies. 

Hakapian started off the presentation by asking the questions: Why is it that genetic art announces itself as the future, when it is rooted in the past? How do longstanding structures of power and western systems of aesthetic value haunt algorithmically-enabled art that purports to be emphatically new? She explained that AI is algorithmically trained to create artwork. It takes images from 80,000 of the greatest artworks, the majority being Renaissance paintings. This means AI systems are programmed on thousands of paintings made by Western European and American artists over the last couple of centuries. In the collections of 18 major US museums, 85% of the artists were white and 87% of them were men. Jill Burke described Renaissance paintings as "shared language of a European cultural elite, deeply entwined in colonialist violence." In recent years, having AI create a portraits of people became popular. Often times people of color found that the AI would struggle to create an accurate portrait. It would whitewash the user, lightening skin tone and changing hair entirely. Knowing the information Hakapian presented, it's no wonder why many AI systems tend to "glitch" when it comes to diversifying their artwork. 

Tweet from Morgan Sung, "The AI portrait generator isn't great at painting people of color" 

AI portrait rendering of Tessa Thompson

I definitely recommend attending this event. It really showed how even AI, which is supposedly unbiased and devoid of any opinion, is the complete opposite. It heavily relies on how it is programmed, and who it is programmed by.  As a person of color, it is disheartening to see that so much of the past still heavily influences our future. This event really brought awareness to the situation. 

Confirmation Screenshot

Works Cited

“About.” Mashinka Firunts, www.mashinkafirunts.com/about/.

“The Birth of Venus by Botticelli: Artworks: Uffizi Galleries.” The Birth of Venus by Botticelli | Artworks | Uffizi Galleries, www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/birth-of-venus.

UCLA. (n.d.). Robots + Art Lecture Part 3. Retrieved April 28, 2023.