Thinking Out LoudAI generates mean images. In more ways than one, says German filmmaker Hito Steyerl.
First, AI-generated images use a vast reservoir of available images to give us a mean or average arrangement of pixels on the screen. Second, the meanness, the nastiness of human beings, is built into this “average” picture.
Mechanical Kurds, a video art installation by Steyerl currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, highlights the mean and shabby living conditions of “click workers” in a refugee camp in Northern Iraq. These click workers are employed by global tech companies to data-tag images that then teach AI how to classify real-life objects.
Steyerl’s drone footage shows the barren landscape, the precarious shelters, and the dusty street grid of the refugee camp. Sometimes her realistic video footage morphs into AI-generated imagery that makes it seem like the streets are the grid of a video game with neon-lit cars.
The click workers in Mechanical Kurds believe their work tagging images as “human” will help train self-driving cars to avoid hitting humans. But later in Steyerl’s video, a Kurdish journalist recounts being the sole survivor of a drone attack. The hideous suggestion is that click workers could also be teaching AI how to target and eliminate real-life humans as they drive in their cars.
Steyerl says that AI-generated images have become like a “dream without sleep”. They are like a weird waking dream that reflects our collective human condition back to us.
I hope that humanity can rouse itself from this waking dream. But I also worry at the real-life horror show upon waking. Waving the AI wand can enhance life but also, potentially, eliminate it. All through mean clicks. But life is precious – not a video game.
This Thinking Out Loud was first published on Facebook.