woman, holding (2020) (installation element)
@Muza
Part of Strangers in a strange land curated by Unfinished Artspace
The work addresses the algorithmic bias of commercially available image description and image creation services. Arranged into an ambiguous form that could be interpreted as a shrine, as a memorial, or as a futuristic display, the work engages with the inherent biases of commercial facial analysis and image-description services that are trained on highly biased data sets (such as Image Net or COCO dataset) and explore the consequent bias that comes with those data sets.
In the creation of the work, a number of images of the artist were taken which were processed through multiple machine learning services that describe imagery. The services were quite unbiased when describing nonhuman and male objects, meaning the service did not use evaluative descriptors like ‘pretty’, ‘good looking’, or ‘sexy’, when describing nature, cityscapes or men wearing clothes. However, when the algorithms described images of women, they used evaluative descriptors in most cases. The same level of evaluative descriptor in the case of a male image was achieved very rarely, compared to the images of women that did not project any sexualised undertones. A shirtless man posing on a club advertisement was labelled as ‘serious’ and ‘fine-looking.
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