What if AI is just recycling our clichés?

With the advent of AI, a question has arisen: is there anything it can't do, any limits? Of course there are. Already, its "creations" are mostly calculations of elements drawn from literature and human production. She reproduces things, but never by herself. It inevitably needs the human touch to direct it towards what it wants.

As this ARTE program shows, AI is capable, when properly guided, of bearing witness to what happens, for example, when a person is under the effect of LSD. An initiative that is not just an opportunity for delirious images, but above all to reproduce the possibilities of psychedelics in mental health treatments. In another project, a Berlin-based artist and gardener has apetized images from the 50s and 60s to create a dystopian fable about intensive agriculture that would create gargantuan vegetables with possible deleterious effects.

On the other hand, AI does seem to have difficulty conceiving images showing, for example, representations of the violence committed by the Marchand mission in the Congo. One youtuber who tried to do this using the algorithms noted that the latter only reproduced images of Africans in poses close to those of the colonists, or fighting amongst themselves. Perhaps, then, we'll have to teach AI and subject it to a variety of information in order to break out of certain biases existing in our conception of the past, among other things.

Duration: 23min42

To listen to the program

Image: Tumisu from Pixabay