Header image: Still taken from Ana Min Wein - Where Am I From - by Nouf Aljowaysi
Three new short film commissions have been created by international artists and researchers, to help engage people with ideas of privacy, agency and trust in connection with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other data-driven technologies.
Artists Nouf Aljowaysir, Juan Covelli and Chris Zhongtian Yuan were chosen for the six-month PATH-AI residency programme where they created pieces reflecting on the creative potential, challenges and limitations of human-AI relationships.
The residency programme is part of the wider PATH-AI project, a collaboration between The Alan Turing Institute, University of Edinburgh and RIKEN in Japan, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the Japan Science and Technology Agency.
The artworks draw on insights from the PATH-AI report's findings, such as broad public concern over power imbalances between users, governments, and corporations, as well as feelings of disempowerment and distrust from the lack of visibility into black-box tools and systems.
In Nouf Aljowaysir’s film Ana Min Wein (Where am I From?), she teaches an AI to unlearn harmful biases as she constructs her genealogical journey and follows the migrational patterns of her Saudi and Iraqi ancestors. By reconfiguring cliched stereotypes of the Arab world and teaching the AI her story, she reclaims the erasure of her family’s collective memory.
Chris Zhongtian Yuan’s Cloudy Song is a tale told in four parts in a not-so-far-away time, following an exile who is trying to recover his memory with a ‘care robot’. Together they try to piece together forgotten memories of the Chinese diaspora around the world.
Juan Covelli’s work, LOS CAÍDOS (The Fallen), takes shape as an AI simulation on a battlefield illustrating the effects of extremist ideologies that bubble online and rupture into the real world using the national strikes in Colombia in 2021 as the main source of inspiration.
The exhibition features on Channel, Somerset House’s new online space for art, ideas and the artistic process.
James Wright, a Research Associate on the PATH-AI project at The Alan Turing Institute, said: “Finding new ways to highlight privacy and trust issues in artificial intelligence is vital to start addressing some of the concerns in this area.
“We hope that these innovative artworks will help viewers to consider the way they use AI technologies and to think about how they’re perceived across different cultural contexts.”
Notes to editors:
The PATH-AI residency programme is a collaboration between Somerset House Studios and the UAL Creative Computing Institute, in partnership with The Alan Turing Institute, the University of Edinburgh, and the RIKEN research institute in Japan. The residency programme is part of the wider PATH-AI project.
