Looking Outwards 11: Societal Impacts of Digital Art

The reading I chose for this blog post is ‘Women in Media Arts: Does AI think like a (white) man?’ The article focuses on female digital artists and feminism within the digital art realm. Through looking at a number of female-created art pieces and projects, the article discusses the ways in which AI and other creative practices shed light on the biases within creators and consumers. One project by Mary Flanagan entitled [“help me know the truth”] explores the way people reinforce their own biases based on others’ physical appearance. Other projects in this article were created with the purpose of combatting the obvious marginalization and discrimination that result from the lack of diversity among those creating digital tools. One example of this is facial recognition software which generally does not accurately recognize people of color. This is just one of the many ways human bias influences artificial intelligence, and there are very real and dangerous consequences that can arise if these types of creative habits are not broken (ex: medical equipment that is only accurate for white male patients).

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