srauch – Blog 11 – Societal Impacts of Digital Art

I found a very interesting episode of Sidedoor, a podcast created by the Smithsonian, that interviewed artist Stephanie Dinkins about her work on how Black stories interact with AI.

Many AIs that are programmed to generate language pull information from the internet. This makes sense – if you’re looking to train an AI to talk, why not use the biggest and most easily accessible database of language in the world? Well, because, as Dinkins articulates, the internet is racist. It’s full of language that, even if it’s not overtly racist, is filled with the inherent racist biases and assumptions that have become ingrained within the English language. Those biases, by extension, become embedded in the AI. To counter this phenomena, Dinkins created Not the Only One: an AI that creates a memoir of a Black American family. It draws its language ability not from the internet, but from the familial stories from Dinkins, her mother, and her grandmother. Her work raises valuable questions about where our information is coming from. While we think of computers as completely logical, we can’t forget that they’re a product of human creation, and thus always susceptible to our biases and human errors.