The “Women Reclaiming AI (WRAI)” art project
The AI Art Corner #8
Beth Jochim, creative AI lead Libre AI and writer; Twitter: @_bblurred
Women Reclaiming AI (WRAI), 2019, is an art project that takes the form of “an AI collaborative voice assistant created by a growing community of self-identifying women”, as we find written on its website.
This is the brainchild of artists and technologists Coral Manton and Birgitte Aga in collaboration with a community of self-identifying women. The intention is to provide this community with a way to make their voices heard in matters of future AI-based technology planning.
Following this idea, conversational AI becomes a means of protesting prejudices and stereotypes that reinforce traditional gender roles and do not represent all the voices and the points of view of people within our society.
On the website of the project, we read that:
“By creating a platform for collective writing and editing, the project co-creates an AI that challenges gender roles.”
The artwork has two components: the first is the voice assistant that is designed by the collective, and the second is an alternative representation of women that evolves over time and is based on images processed by GANs. The GAN uses a dataset of images of women who participated in the project and of women considered very inspirational. This has brought to the creation of an alternative dataset that the group considers more inclusive and representative.
The artists, thus, are redesigning the future for robots, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the audience through the organization of events, workshops and installations in which the theme of bias in technology is treated in an ironic way.
This work is therefore positioned among those that ask us to reflect on the use of technology, underlining how the technology we use every day, even a chatbot, can also have a hidden problematic side.
To listen to the artists in conversation:
To visit the project and try the chatbox:
