From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’
The (in)visible prejudices within Artificial Intelligence
In the exhibition From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ at Barbican Centre’s Curve gallery, artist Trevor Paglen reveals the controversial images behind the training process of Artificial Intelligence(AI).
To begin with, right at the exhibition’s entrance, Paglen presents a photo to demonstrate how a computer analyses René Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pomme” (1964). Though René Magritte wrote, “it is not an apple” on his painted apple, for computers, the picture is of an apple without any other possibilities. With this demonstration, Paglen indicates that AI is a fixed system made by coding. He questions whether machine intelligence has the ability to understand the meaning of objects in the human world.
Trevor Paglen selects several categories, consisting of more than 30,000 photographs from ImageNet, a databank which is used to train AI to “see” the human world. Each category is surrounded by related printed photos and forms a mosaic-like formation on a 90-metre long curved wall. The installation starts with an image tagged with the word ‘Apple’ and branches through ‘Sun’, ‘Pizza’, ‘Rat’, ‘Alcoholic’…ending with ‘Anomaly. The photos used in the artwork are grouped by the workers of ImageNet into thousands of labels and categories; this projects the personal stereotypes of those workers. It is obvious that the pictures surrounding tags of fruit or animals are as neutral as they can be: the tag ‘Apple’ is circled by pictures of apple trees, apple models, sliced apples etc.. However, while moving to labels relating to human activities or abstract nouns, the hidden biases come to the surface. For example, lots of Asian lawyers’ pictures are put under the ‘Divorced lawyer’ label; meanwhile, images of western people with angry faces are recognised as ‘Racist’ and people holding a bottle of beer are classed as ‘Alcoholics’. The artist intends to point out the problematic system that AI engineers use for the machine’s learning. It seems that the virtual world hasn’t built up guidelines to identify and limit people’s politically incorrect behaviours, yet AI itself has been riddled with stereotypes. Nowadays, AI technology is used to collect personal preferences and uploaded photos on social media for placing ads, then affect our buying behaviours. It is possible that the website will show powdered milk ads to a person because he/she has pictures with kids. How can we trust machines to analyse our face and lives appropriately? Are we associated with labels and categories that we are not supposed to be in?
Outside the content of the exhibition, there is one thing worth noting: due to the fact that the meaning of the pictures on the wall could be misinterpreted of the exhibition content, the gallery restricts people from taking photos. This strategy could potentially encourage visitors to focus on the display itself and read the images deeply. However, this limitation might also reduce the engagement of visitors in the exhibition when posting and sharing pictures with friends on the Internet becomes nonviable. The other thing that effect visiting experience is the exhibition space. The Curve gallery in Barbican Centre aims at providing young and emerging artists with a place for showing their ideas and practices. The gallery space is a narrow corridor with only one entrance/exit, meaning that visitors have to walk in and out following the same route. The benefit of this is that artworks on both sides of the walls could be read by all visitors (though in the exhibition only uses one wall), but it might be boring to look at the installation twice.
Overall, From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ provides a chance to glimpse into the complex and controversial training of Artificial Intelligence and reminds visitors that different biases exist and are ongoing in the digital world. Responding to an era where technology is rapidly progressing, we need to rethink about what materials and methods we took to create machine intelligence.
From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ continues until the 16 February 2020 at Barbican Centre’s Curve gallery.
Additional resources
1. René Magritte introduction on Curiator
https://curiator.com/art/rene-magritte
2. Barbican Meets: Trevor Paglen on YouTube
https://youtu.be/juSXaQWNXgU
▄ Patina (PinChieh Pan)
PinChieh Pan is a current student at MA Curating Contemporary Design Kingston School of Art. She studied product and interior design at National Taiwan Normal University. PinChieh is interested in the study of audience experience and exhibition space.
Peer Reviewed by: Rosalita Baldassin
Editor: Misato Ehara & Carmel Wilkinson-Ayre
