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Societal Impacts of Digital Art
ImageRoulette, an Artificial Intelligence device for generating labels, has been controversial due to its racial bias. Image Roulette is a classification tool that generates tags or labels based on an image of a person. These tags usually focus on occupation or suggested family roles. However, when several black tried this device out, they found that out of all 2500 tags, they were only labeled as “black”. When photos were varied, the results were the same and there was no further effort made by the software to classify other aspects of a black person’s photo.
Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, developers of ImageRoulette, claim that this is exactly what they hope to represent. They believe that they have proved that Artificial Intelligence is also subject to human bias and racism and that these topics will continue to follow us into the future. This project acted more like an art piece than a usable program; as of September 27th, 2019, it has been taken off the internet.