Description

The arrival of general purpose AI (GPAI) tools present a critical moment in AI’s publicity and the role of art within. On one hand, generative AI systems perpetuate the hyped genrefication and commodification of creative AI outputs as art, which troubles our understanding of what art is and more importantly how art is valued by the art industrial complex. On the other hand, the extractive nature of these systems raise fundamental questions surrounding questions of copyright and intellectual property.

The exhibition (de)Stabilizing Diffusions aims to defy the hype around generative AI tools by reshifting the focus on investigating these systems in and through artistic practice. It is then not the outputs that are of interest but rather the critical practices that artists employ when working with AI. Over the course of 10-days the exhibition showcases in-depth documentation of the creative strategies artists use to critically dissect generative AI systems. By doing so (de)Stabilizing Diffusions not only gives insights into how these systems work but more importantly aims at inspiring the adoption of similar strategies by engaged publics.

The exhibition is an extension of the two-day critical AI symposium (un)Stable Diffusions, which takes place on May 23 and 24 at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute. As a collaborative effort between the Machine Agencies working group at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute, the MUTEK festival of digital creativity and the Society for Arts and Technology the exhibition presents a continued effort into breaking down boundaries between artistic practice, academic research, and public engagement.

Ali M. Demirel – Iwakura Artefacts

Rooted in Shintoist mythology, Iwakura refers to the spirits that inhabit sacred rock formations found all over Japan. Originally conceived as an audiovisual performance for the full-dome, Iwakura Artefacts uncovers the creative strategies that visual artist Ali M. Demirel employed to critically incorporate AI in his process. Ranging from super resolution and image stitching to artificial slow motion, the presented prints showcase the challenges, opportunities, and happy accidents AI brings to the artistic process.

More about Ali M. Demirel

Debashis Sinha – The Lion and the Bull: a methodology of embracing failure (i, ii, iii)

Sinha offers 3 short audio papers detailing his process of working with machine learning in sound production. Rather than relying on the traditional imperatives of classification and reproduction in machine learning, Sinha leans into a process of refusal and the embracing of failure, both as a method of sound generation and as a way to expose the many shortcomings of neural networks in replicating human (and non-human) experiences and systems of knowledge. In these essays, Sinha focuses on his work “The Lion and The Bull” from his recent release “Adeva_v000_04”, taking the listener through his composition process, the sonic material, and the ideas that permeate his work with machine learning systems and their misfires.

More about Debashis Sinha

Evan Light, Craig Fahner, Ellouise McGeachie & Quinn MacNeil – Enter the Ring: Facing Amazon’s Ring of Surveillance

Enter the Ring: Facing Amazon’s Ring of Surveillance is an immersive art installation wherein gallery-goers are invited to experience facial recognition in real-time with the use of our custom-built facial recognition visualizer. Accompanying the facial recognition experience is a 12-minute video that analyses the Amazon Ring, debunking innocuous advertising campaigns and explaining precisely what Ring owners have gotten themselves into. A six-page, tri-fold gallery guide provides users with further information about Amazon Ring and facial recognition more generally.

Isabella Salas & Hexorcismos – Transfiguraciones

Isabella Salas and Hexorcismos uncover the data sets of Prehispanic masks from Mesoamerica, which underlie their audiovisual performance, Transfiguraciones. Employing decolonial approaches to working with AI, the original performance revolves around the idea of transfiguration, approaching the Neural Network as an alchemical technology for distillation of styles. “Transfiguration” treats the GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) as a kind of homunculus able to morph one design aesthetic into another, while preserving the input’s cadence and long-form structure.

More about Isabella Salas & Hexorcismos

Tim Murray-Browne – Agency of chaos, unmoved

An open-ended performance with real-time AI-generated audio. The computer music pioneer Joel Chadabe described performing with a non-deterministic system as like sailing a boat through stormy seas. A storm has its own agency of chaos, unmoved by whatever intentions I may have in harnessing its forces. In moments of desperation, it’s tempting to think that the storm is aware of our plight as it ushers or torments us.

Tim Murray-Browne is a computational artist, engineer and researcher, and resident artist with Machine Agencies at Concordia University. His practice connects dance, creative coding, and generative audio-visuals to unearth the parts of human wildness left behind by technology. His current work explores new forms of real-time human-AI interaction rooted in human movement and embodied consciousness. 

More about Tim Murray-Browne

Anteism Books – Exploring the Intersection of Art, Books, and AI

Anteism Books is delighted to present a curated selection of books that delve into the captivating intersection of art, books, and artificial intelligence. Committed to embracing cutting-edge approaches in art and publishing, Anteism has led an exploration into how machine intelligence may revolutionize the ways we write and read books.

The featured projects encompass a collaborative poetry series born from human-machine cooperation, a mesmerizing collection of neural network-generated portraits, and an environmentally conscious reinterpretation of landscape paintings using data aggregation technologies.

The collection offers non-technical introductions to emerging AI techniques and their potential applications in artistic practices. These resources encourage thoughtful discussions about the role of art in the age of machine intelligence.

Anteism Publisher Harley Smart will also showcase a series of artist books which demonstrate the integration of generative AI and augmented reality in contemporary book arts practices. Created within Concordia’s Masters of Design and Computation Arts program, these works exemplify the numerous opportunities AI presents in shaping the future of independent publishing and artistic expression.

Find out more about Anteism Book

Partners:

• Machine Agencies
• Society for Arts and Technology
• MUTEK
• Anteism Books

This event draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

A two-day international symposium on AI’s publics, publicities, and publicizations at Milieux Institute, Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.

Register here free to attend in person and online.

About (un)Stable Diffusions

21st-century AI is very much in its formative stage: It is still unsettled, and is continually being both stabilised and contested by diverse sets of actors: from technologists, startup founders and global companies to policy makers, journalists, and civil society. For some, AI is being positioned as a fix to our social problems, which in turn will change how we live, communicate, work and travel. Others raise substantive concerns that these developments might reinforce inequality, exacerbate the opacity of decision-making processes, and ultimately question human autonomy. We are thus living in a time when the infrastructures and institutions of our everyday lives are being (re)built at the hands of techniques which already elude popular and professional understanding; but while the controversies about the specific pathways to be taken are still visible, we can already perceive elements of closure and institutionalization.

Our symposium invites contributions from an international audience to interrogate the shaping of AI. Building on an international collaboration between research teams from Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Canada, we invite presentations that pursue critical engagements with AI’s  media representations, policy framings, and scientific debates. Crucially, we also invite epistemic reflections in how we are all Shaping AI, including practice-based research or research-creation. 

Local organizers include Meaghan Wester, Sophie Toupin, Jonathan Roberge, Robert Marinov, Fenwick McKelvey, Maurice Jones, and Guillaume Dandurand

Special Issue

(un)Stable Diffusions: General-purpose artificial intelligence’s publicities, publics, and publicizations

Edited by Fenwick McKelvey, Joanna Redden, Jonathan Roberge, and Luke Stark (names in alphabetical order)

To be published in the open access Journal of Digital Social Research. Submission form coming soon.

Learn more about the call for proposals

Find out about Keynotes, Location & More at the Website

Datum: 29. January 2024 – 30. January 2024

Time: 09:00

Street: Reichpietschufer 50

Location: Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)

On behalf of the international research project Shaping 21st Century AI, the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and the ZeMKI, University of Bremen, in cooperation with the research group “Politics of Digitalization” at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), invite to an international conference on the topic of AI controversies. The conference was held in English.

Controversies about AI abound, especially since ChatGPT took over the Internet by storm, becoming the most popular applications in the Web’s history within only a few months. The current excitement about the perils and prospects of general purpose AI applications like ChatGPT is only the most recent wave of public interest in the long history of “artificial intelligence” (AI). With its metaphysical imaginaries of human-machine symbiosis, anthropomorphic robots and machine thinking, arguably oversized scientific claims and technological developments in this field have always raised concerns. What the current debate makes much more visible than previous attention cycles, though, is that contemporary AI companies and scientists dominate not only the discourse promoting AI’s prospects but also that on AI’s perils. From engineers at OpenAI to research pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, technologists and industry-based scientists increasingly articulate warnings that AI might cause serious and fundamental damage to societies. With this move, the already dominant players are now also occupying the space of public critique, yielding the risk that activism, social science, critical journalism and the arts are pushed even further  to the margins of public and expert debates. Are we currently having the public controversies on AI that we should have, or is AI panic derailing us from actual and relevant concerns? How do we get to the controversies that we need and to the exploration and articulation of society-centered AI?

The conference will hold keynotes, panels and interventions from scholars, civil society and practitioners on the topic of AI controversies.

Agenda

Monday, 29 January 2024

Tuesday, 30 January 2024

Organisation

The conference is organised as a closing event of the project Shaping 21st Century AI, which is a multinational collaboration of partners in Germany, France, UK and Canada that examines the global trajectories of public discourse on artificial intelligence. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Germany), the Agence nationale de la Recherche (ANR, France), the Economic and Social Research Council of UK Research and Innovation (ESRC, the UK) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC, Canada) in the Open Research Area (ORA) scheme.

Questions

If you have any questions, you can contact the conference organisers via shifting-ai@hiig.de.

The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI, University of Bremen) are in collaboration organising an expert workshop on the topic of “Shifting AI controversies: Are the AI controversies that we have the AI controversies we need?”. The workshop will be held in German.

On the one hand, AI technologies are considered to be able to solve major problems of our societies, such as climate change, fighting misinformation or helping to detect illnesses in the medical field. On the other hand, there are legitimate debates about political and economic inequality, which is reinforced by the use of AI technologies. These debates do not stop at the scientific discourse itself.

For this workshop, experts from science, politics and civic society come together to discuss controversies about artificial intelligence. Which developments in the field of AI are particularly controversial? What does the current state of the discourse on AI and its controversies look like? Which issues should play a more significant role in public discourse and how can these issues be put on the agenda?

The goal of the workshop is to answer the question: Are the AI controversies that we have the AI controversies we need? To start the exchange, the Shaping AI team shares its preliminary results on AI controversies in policy, media and research discourses in Germany over the last decade. These existing controversies are then discussed and evaluated. In addition, the Public Interest AI research group will share a perspective on how to approach public interest in AI debates and developments. This opens up the discussion on needed AI controversies and how to shape them.

Agenda

Partners

The event is organised as part of the project Shaping 21st Century AI, which is a multinational collaboration of partners in Germany, UK, Canada and France that examines the global trajectories of public discourse on artificial intelligence. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the national funding bodies of the partner countries in the Open Research Area (ORA) scheme.

The event is organised as a non-public expert workshop. A workshop report will be published on this website shortly after the event.

Artificial Intelligence has been the subject of widespread public controversy in recent years, but are we currently having the debates about AI that we will need to engage in as a society? During this design-led research workshop, we invite experts in AI from different fields to work with us to address the following question: how do we get from the AI controversies that we have today to the AI controversies that we need?

Hosted by the ESRC-funded project Shaping AI, the workshop will include a presentation of a social study of AI controversies (2017-2022). This will provide the basis for a collaborative research activity supported by design methods. We will use a diagnostic tool to determine the “shape” of selected AI controversies: are recent English-language controversies about AI in good or bad shape when it comes to participation, relevance, engagement with social context, and the role of power? Based on our shared diagnoses, we will work together to “re-shape” the selected disputes and formulate society-centric requirements for AI controversies to come.

Practical Information

This participatory research workshop will take place at Friends House (173-177 Euston Rd, London NW1 2BJ). The event will run from 10:00am to 5:00pm and catering will be provided.

Workshop topic and purpose

The international social research project Shaping AI is currently conducting a comparative study of AI controversies for the period 2012-2022 in four countries (Germany, France, UK and Canada). This on-going study has highlighted the strong influence of promotional industry discourse on AI debates in research, media, and public policy. Perhaps inevitably, discussions across these domains have been dominated by sensational claims regarding the unprecedented predictive, diagnostic, and communicative capacities of Generative AI (Castelle, 2020).

A related insight arising from Shaping AI’s on-going research concerns the significant, and relatively sudden, expansion of public policy debates in the area of “AI and society.” Here, AI discourse is generating an abundance of “problematizations,” definitions of real and potential problems, threats, and harms (exploitation, misinformation, privacy invasion, racism, bias, physical harm, cheating), to the point that assumed dynamics of public policy discourse formation on technological risks (Stirling, 2008) — problem definition, problem selection, prioritization, policy formulation and stabilization — do not appear to obtain in this case.

These two observations highlight the significant challenges involved in the development of robust and comprehensive understandings of the new capabilities, benefits, risks and harms generated by AI as a strategic area of research and innovation. Yet, precisely because of the emergence of unprecedented scientific and technological capacities, and associated societal harms, benefits and risks, we as a society need clarity of vision, focused debate, and critical intervention in relation to AI more than ever.

During this participatory research workshop, we therefore invite experts in AI and society from different areas of expertise (science, media, policy, activism and the arts) to review Shaping AI’s on-going analysis of AI controversies, and specifically the UK team’s study of English-language research controversies in the areas of AI and/or AI and society. The provisional results of this study, which combines online consultation, social media analysis and interviews, will provide the grounding for design-led collaborative inquiry into AI controversies during the workshop, as we invite participants to work with us to address the question: how do we get from the AI controversies that we currently have to the AI controversies that we need?

Using methods of “data physicalization” (Jansen et al, 2015), we have designed a ‘re-constructive’ exercise of shaping and re-shaping AI controversies: in two collaborative activities, we will collectively diagnose the state of selected AI controversies, and on this basis, formulate requirements for AI controversies to come.

Workshop activities

The workshop will consist of three parts: presentation, shaping, and re-shaping of AI controversies. During the first designed activity (“Shaping AI”), we will work in small groups to determine the state of selected AI controversies. To make this task feasible, we have identified a set of exemplary research controversies about AI that took place in English-language media during the period 2017-2022. Using a diagnostic tool that has been specifically designed for this purpose – the “controversy shape shifter”- we will interpret a document “dossier” that the Shaping AI team has created for each controversy, and, on this basis, evaluate the controversy in question along a diverse set of axes of interpretation (relevance, power, situatedness, agency). This will then allow us to determine this controversy’s “shape.” Once we have settled on these shapes of the selected AI controversies, we will take up methods of participatory design to re-shape these controversies, projecting their desired features and formulate requirements and needs for AI controversies to come. We will thus use dataintensive,= participatory design methods in order to evaluate the precise ways in which the selected AI controversies can be considered to be in “bad shape” — or, possibly, in better shape than expected — and to determine the features of the AI research controversies that will need to take place in years to come. Participants

For this workshop we have invited UK-based experts in AI and society from science, the humanities, public policy, journalism, activism and the arts. Several of our participants have contributed to the online expert consultation on important but overlooked AI controversies that the Shaping AI team conducted in the autumn of 2021.

Outputs

We will produce a short visual workshop report summarising the workshop findings and insights. During the workshop, we will discuss the possibility of a co-authored journal article on Shifting AI Controversies.

Provisional Schedule

• 10:00 – 10:15 Introductions
• 10:15 – 11:00 Presentation and discussion: Analysis of AI research controversies
• 11:00 – 11:15 Break
• 11:15 – 12:30 Activity 1: Shaping AI Controversies
• 12:30- 13:00 Presentation of results
• 13:00-13.45 Lunch
• 13:45-15:00 Activity 2: Re-shaping AI Controversies
• 15:00-15:15 Break
• 15:15-16:30 Presentation of results
• 16:30-17:00 Discussion and Wrap-up
• 17:00 End