Two-headed dog on a beach: when algorithms go awry
Google Street View glitches can throw up weird images and raise queries about the machines on which we rely, writes Melissa Gronlund
What does artificial intelligence look like? How do we perceive the forms of machine-based intelligence that are all around us: the algorithms that determine social media newsfeeds or Siri’s responses to smartphone queries?
Attempting to understand technological processes is often equated with being able to see them. This is perhaps one reason why Kyle Williams’ images of Google Street View glitches are so beloved – they are glimpses of the algorithm by where it fails.
Another reaction to AI is to anthropomorphise it – the way robots are spoken about as human or animal-like, such as the “dog-like” robot that can open a door. Gender also plays an important role. It is not insignificant that the two most popular digital assistants, Alexa and Siri, are female.
Although technology is ubiquitous, the precise nature of its effects is often hard to grasp. Exactly how we think, both technically and culturally, about automation and AI is the subject of this year’s Global Art Forum, the acclaimed series of talks and panel discussions that runs alongside Art Dubai next month. Under the theme ‘I Am Not a Robot’, it looks at the way that AI wields power on our lives – and also at how artists differ from robotic life. “We are embodied,” says Marlies Wirth, one of the cocommissioners with Shumon Basar and Noah Raford. “We are not just brains.”
Cinema is a particularly important place where cultural anxieties over automation and AI are played out, argues Basar, a theorist of, among other things, technology. “Throughout the 20th century, cinema has been the main space in which we have come to both know and fear the oncoming threat of automation, AI and the singularity,” Basar says.
Technological singularity is the idea that at a certain point, robots, or other forms of AI, will achieve an intelligence that, amplified by neural networks, surpasses human intelligence.
Basar sees the way that culture interacts with technology as symptomatic of broader biases and anxieties. “There’s an important aspect of gender and patriarchal power that’s smuggled into the rendering of female robots, and the role that they play in simultaneously evoking desire and fear.”
The series of talks began last week at Dubai Design District with Basar (on the subject of female robots), Wirth and Raford, as well as British artist and technology critic James Bridle, investigating AI as both a technological and a cultural phenomenon.
Bridle, for example, looks at weather prediction, which is one of the first uses of computation as a form of prediction. “That’s always been a matter of control. The only reason you’re going to predict the future is so you can control it.”
In the late 2000s, Bridle began collecting images on his Tumblr blog that captured what he called the New Aesthetic, or images that managed to capture, whether by style or subject, digital technologies in everyday lives.
His writing has crossed over between the specialised field of technology and its wider implications – his story on children’s consumption of YouTube videos went viral last spring. “Technology,” he says, “is an expression of culture.”
In the past few years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the field “There was a critical mass from the internet, which was the take-up of research into AI by Google and Facebook, which had access to both vast processing power and vast data sets. It turns out that this iteration of AI is about having this extraordinary and surveillant view of the world that gives AI something to build upon,” he says. Bridle says that anthropomorphising is misguided: what is particular about this resurgence of AI is its invisibility.
“This is not the AI that people thought we’d get or that people imagined,” Bridle says. “This has nothing to do with human intelligence. It’s something deeply machinic and deeply mathematical.”
Basar agrees: “As processes of automation become more invisible, and less looking like us, they become ubiquitous and influence our lives even more. There are very few corners of our social, personal and political lives that seem unaffected by these processes.”
How we think about automation and AI is the subject of this year’s Global Art Forum