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Event Blog - LASER: Decolonizing AI

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    My confirmation email for the event.  Last week, I attended the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) talk on Decolonizing AI. We got to hear from Amir Baradaran, Mashinka Hakopian, Satinder Gill, and Karamjit Gill. As someone who is on the internet possibly too much, the conversation about AI generative art is something I see every day. One big trend I've seen a lot recently is people using AI filters on Tiktok to see themselves in another artstyle, and a lot of non-white people are being not only lightened but also having their physical features that don't fit a narrow standard of European beauty being erased. A screenshot from Mashinka Hakopian's presentation.  In the talk, Hakopian discussed how a lot of training data for AI generative art is primarily white and also significantly men, which means that the things it produces are trending towards that as well. When creating new art with AI, they are just creating the same kind of art that's been boug...
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Week 8 Post

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 The first thing that I was reminded of when watching the lecture videos, especially the parts about tunneling photography, was an Instagram artist I have been following for quite awhile called @In_Visible_World. They describe themselves as a "macro-ultra-macro-microscopist" and make videos where they stitch together high quality images from vastly different scales to create a smooth zoom into an object. I can't include a video so I am providing a screenshot but I highly recommend following the link and checking out the account. This video goes from a high quality camera shot all the way to an electron microscope image of the charcoal tip.   Screenshot of charcoal pencil video by @in_visible_world. (1)  My art has always included butterflies, so when I saw that there were nanotech applications of the structures in butterfly wings I wanted to learn more. It turns out there are a ton of applications, from adding carbon nanotubes to a wing surface to make a structure that ge...
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