Spaces:
Running
Running
File size: 14,748 Bytes
ac25a9d 6468797 ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d b1a18ac ac25a9d 5862c93 404320b ac25a9d 578894e ac25a9d 578894e ac25a9d b791946 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ab6203c 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ab6203c 404320b ac25a9d ab6203c 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 37d96b6 4f049c9 679291e 4f049c9 578894e 37d96b6 b1a18ac ac25a9d 404320b f62078f d770ac7 f62078f 7eceac2 404320b ac25a9d b1a18ac ac25a9d 404320b ac25a9d 5daac75 578894e ac25a9d 578894e ac25a9d |
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 |
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="description"
content="Datafication And Distortion In Generative AI">
<meta name="keywords" content="Generative AI, Henrietta Lacks, Distortion, Identity Loss, AI Art">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Because of You (2024)</title>
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com">
<link rel="preconnect" href="https://fonts.gstatic.com" crossorigin>
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Libre+Franklin:wght@400;600&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Google+Sans|Noto+Sans|Castoro"
rel="stylesheet">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="./static/css/bulma.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="./static/css/bulma-carousel.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="./static/css/bulma-slider.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="./static/css/fontawesome.all.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet"
href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/jpswalsh/academicons@1/css/academicons.min.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="./static/css/index.css">
<link rel="icon" href="./static/images/favicon.svg">
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script defer src="./static/js/fontawesome.all.min.js"></script>
<script src="./static/js/bulma-carousel.min.js"></script>
<script src="./static/js/bulma-slider.min.js"></script>
<script src="./static/js/index.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<section class="hero">
<div class="hero-body">
<div class="container is-max-desktop">
<div class="columns is-centered">
<div class="column has-text-centered">
<h1 class="title is-1 publication-title">Because of You (2024)</h1>
<h2 class="subtitle is-3 publication-subtitle">Datafication And Distortion In Generative AI</h2>
<div class="is-size-5 publication-authors">
<span class="author-block">
<a href="https://www.cyberneticforests.com/" target='_blank'>Eryk Salvaggio</a><sup>1</sup>,</span>
<span class="author-block">
<a href="https://evijit.io" target='_blank'>Avijit Ghosh</a><sup>2</sup></span>
</div>
<div class="is-size-5 publication-authors">
<span class="author-block"><sup>1</sup>Siegel Family Endowment,</span>
<span class="author-block"><sup>2</sup>Hugging Face</span>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<section class="section">
<div class="container is-max-desktop">
<!-- Paper video. -->
<div class="columns is-centered">
<div class="column is-full">
<!-- <h2 class="title is-3">Video</h2> -->
<div class="publication-video">
<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;">
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/906478786?h=626387a4a3" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<!--/ Paper video. -->
</div>
</section>
<section class="section">
<div class="container is-max-desktop">
<div class="columns is-centered has-text-justified">
<!-- Body. -->
<div class="column">
<div class="content">
<p>
In a 2022 paper, <a href="https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2209.07667" target='_blank'>Can There Be Art Without an Artist?</a>, Dr. Avijit Ghosh and Genoveva Fossas discussed the work of human artists within training data for generative AI tools. In the appendix, they connect the practice of scraping training data without consent to its famous precedent in biology, citing the case of <a href="https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/the-stolen-cells-of-henrietta-lacks-and-their-ongoing-contribution-to-science">Henrietta Lacks:</a>
</p>
<blockquote>
“Henrietta Lacks is known as “immortal” for a reason – though she died of cervical cancer at age 30, scientists have used her remarkable cells countless times since. HeLa cells, that never stop dividing and hence are functionally immortal, have played a role in some of the most important medical advancements of our time. They were used to develop the polio vaccine, chemotherapy and cloning technology, among others. However, the original cells that started the immortal HeLa cell line were taken from her without her consent or the awareness of her family. Now her family is demanding compensation from Johns Hopkins University who first took the cells. The HeLa cell controversy is yet another cautionary tale about the dangers of cutting out human creators in the pursuit of technology and a lesson in ethics, privacy and consent in technological progress.”
</blockquote>
<p>
<em>Because of You</em> is a digital video work inspired by this connection, and subsequent conversations between Eryk Salvaggio and Dr. Avijit Ghosh, which began at a <a href="https://schedule.sxsw.com/2023/events/PP122773"> presentation on AI and art at SXSW in 2023.</a>
</p>
<p>
The piece is defined by its soundtrack, a recording of jazz musician <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/3Zq0oN9QkJ1KtEvDrASIxG?si=3d9162b3b0394362">Tab Smith’s 1951 instrumental ballad, “Because of You,”</a> slowed down to a quarter of its speed while isolating specific harmonic features. The song is both a historical marker — it was released the year that Lacks’ cells were taken without her consent, reflecting Lacks’ love of dancing — recollections by family members shared that Lacks would frequent dance halls at the time that these cells were being studied and analyzed without her knowledge.
</p>
<p>
In its title, and in the act of stretching this song out across a broader expanse of time, we emphasize the reach of that event, but also the extension of time through Lacks’ cells and the distortions created by time and the reprocessing of memory into the abstraction of data. Who is Henrietta Lacks? She is a person, and she is the progenitor of a series of cells that survived her without her name — data about her body without reference to the person.
</p>
<p>
The video piece explores links between the datafication of the body and the datafication of human expression. AI generated images cannot faithfully generate an image of Lacks’ face, as there is sparse documentation of who she was. In this piece, we drawing from an AI generated image of Henrietta Lacks, which appears close to the original but then drifts toward the image of a black woman, clearly styled for 2024. We revive the memory of Henrietta Lacks through using her name in the prompt, but that memory is distant from Lacks herself: much as it is with her cells.
</p>
<figure>
<img src="static/images/HeLa1-small.jpg" alt="Description of the image">
<figcaption>A still from Because of You.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>
The film is narrated by a digital voice double of Dr. Ghosh — trained on a short sample of his voice. This regenerated voice describes the abstraction of Lacks’ life into cellular data, drawing parallels to the distortions introduced to his own voice — including the removal of his Bengali Indian accent, unexpectedly replaced with the inflections of a statistically averaged North American.
</p>
<p>
Noise is a central element of this piece. In a sense, it envisions the training of a diffusion model as an in-between place: between information, contributed by humans, and the complete stripping away of that information, which is an aspect of AI model training.
</p>
<p>
Digital static stands in for the role of Gaussian noise in the training and generation of AI images. Noise is deeply embedded into the visual language of AI images, in that its training requires the removal of information from human archives in order to learn how to rebuild images from nothing. This process of information removal and restoration — the addition and subtraction of noise — is repeated millions of times while training a diffusion based model.
</p>
<p>
Here, Salvaggio draws parallels to the “removal of information” from Lacks, in her cells and in her visage, and the removal of information from the images created by humans for training data: images which, Salvaggio has noted, includes not only visual art, but private photographs, snapshots, and even documentation of child abuse, trauma, and historic atrocities. Salvaggio’s work often emphasizes this abstract destruction and recombination of all visual culture in AI models.
</p>
</div>
</div>
<!--/ Body. -->
</div>
</section>
<section class="section" style="margin-bottom: 1em;">
<div class="container is-max-desktop content">
<h2 class="title">Bios</h2>
<div class="column has-text-justified">
<p><a href="https://www.cyberneticforests.com" target='_blank'><strong>Eryk Salvaggio</strong></a> is an Emerging Technology Research Advisor at the Siegel Family Endowment and a new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work, which is centered in creative misuse and the right to refuse, critiques the mythologies and ideologies of technologies that ignore the gaps between datasets and the world they claim to represent. A blend of <a href="https://www.cyberneticforests.com/defcon31">hacker</a>, <a href="https://www.techpolicy.press/author/eryk-salvaggio/">policy researcher</a>, <a href="https://www.cyberneticforests.com/about">designer and artist</a>, he has been published in academic journals such as <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389920302397">Patterns</a>, <a href="https://direct.mit.edu/leon/article-abstract/56/6/575/115406/Infinite-Barnacle-The-AI-Image-and-Imagination-in">Leonardo</a>, and <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3587241">Interactions of the ACM</a>, spoken at <a href="https://www.cmc.ie/events/2024/apr/music-current-2024-eryk-salvaggio-ai-workshop">music</a> and <a href="https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/the-age-of-noise/">media festivals</a>, and has consulted on tech policy at the national level.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.evijit.io" target='_blank'><strong>Dr. Avijit Ghosh</strong></a> is an Applied Policy Researcher in the Machine Learning and Society Team at <a href="https://www.huggingface.co/">Hugging Face 🤗</a>. He works at the intersection of machine learning, ethics, and policy, aiming to implement fair ML algorithms into the real world. He has published and peer-reviewed several research papers in top ML and AI Ethics venues, and has organized academic workshops as a member of <a href="https://www.queerinai.com/">QueerInAI.</a> His work has been covered in the press, including articles in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/16/technology/ai-defcon-hackers.html">The New York Times</a>, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2023/09/01/ai-red-teams-google-nvidia-microsoft-meta/">Forbes</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/16/ai-racism-chatgpt-gemini-bias">The Guardian</a>, <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-ads-can-still-discriminate-against-women-and-older-workers-despite-a-civil-rights-settlement">Propublica</a>, <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/new-york-city-proposes-regulating-algorithms-hiring/">Wired</a>, and the <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/02/11/1017955/auditors-testing-ai-hiring-algorithms-bias-big-questions-remain/">MIT Tech Review.</a> Dr. Ghosh has been an invited speaker as a Responsible AI expert, at events held by organizations such as <a href="https://www.sxsw.com/">SXSW</a>, <a href="https://www.trustworthyml.org/">Trustworthy ML Initiative</a>, <a href="https://avidml.org/arva/">AI Risk and Vulnerability Alliance</a>, and <a href="https://aivillage.org/">AI Village</a>. He has also engaged with policymakers, having spoken to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7149203323592617984/">US Congressional Staffers</a> and to the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/centre-for-data-ethics-and-innovation">UK Government Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation</a>. His research and outreach have led to real-world impact, such as helping <a href="https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-artificial-intelligence-2fe8d3ef7008d299d9d810f0c0f7905d">shape regulation in New York City</a> and causing Facebook to <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2022/06/expanding-our-work-on-ads-fairness/">remove their biased ad targeting algorithm.</a></p>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<section class="section" style="margin-bottom: 1em;">
<div class="container is-max-desktop content">
<h2 class="title">News</h2>
<div class="column">
<p><strong>Apr 8, 2024: </strong><em>Because of You</em> was accepted in the <a href="https://cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/2024/CallForAIArt">CVPR 2024 AI Art Gallery</a>. See you in Seattle!</p>
<p><strong>Apr 13, 2024: </strong><em>Because of You</em> won Best AI Film at the <a href="https://filmfreeway.com/CineTechFutureFest">CineTech Future Fest</a>.</p>
<p><strong>June 20, 2024: </strong><em>Because of You</em> was named one of the three winning art pieces at CVPR 2024 AI Art Gallery! We were named on the <a href="https://thecvf-art.com/shortlist/">shortlist</a> ahead of the event.</p>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<footer class="footer" style="padding: 0;">
<div class="container">
<div class="columns is-centered has-text-centered">
<div class="column is-6">
<div class="content">
<p style="text-align: center;">
Page built off of the <a href="https://www.github.com/nerfies/nerfies.github.io">nerfiles source code</a>.
</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</footer>
<script>
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() {
var links = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
for (var i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
links[i].setAttribute("target", "_blank");
}
});
</script>
</body>
</html> |