What is it about?
If we take pictures of our lives from the perspective of an AI system, we can better understand how those systems work, argues Eryk Salvaggio — an artist whose practice involves taking hundreds of images of his life for training a personal image generator. In this piece, the artist and technologist describes how that process changes the way he looks at the world through the camera’s lens. For example, shifting the photographer’s eye from the unique subjects of the world to the patterns behind it.
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Photo by Ion Fet on Unsplash
Why is it important?
AI images have been sweeping the cultural zeitgeist, but the metaphors of art making and sight have complicated the public’s understanding of what they do. The author suggests that making photographs specifically for these tools can reveal troubling logics embedded into machines, as well as finding new ways to see the things we might otherwise ignore.
Perspectives
As an artist working with technology, I aim to clarify the many entanglements it has with our own ways of thinking and seeing. My practice tries to reveal the subtle ways these technologies shape our vision of the world. By making them more explicit, I hope we can have more meaningful questions about the changes we want to see, as well as the things we want to preserve.
Eryk Salvaggio
Rochester Institute of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Seeing Like a Dataset: Notes on AI Photography, interactions, May 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3587241.
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