Learning to See is a series of works that use machine learning algorithms to reflect on how our own cognitive biases shape how we ‘see’ and make sense of the world.
The series includes a number of videos, as well as an interactive installation in which custom neural networks analyse a live camera feed pointing at a table covered in everyday objects, and attempt to reconstruct it in real time, drawing on their prior experience (i.e. training data) and knowledge (i.e. what is learned during training).
An artificial neural network looks out onto the world, and tries to make sense of what it is seeing. But it can only see through the filter of what it already knows.
Just like us.
Because we too, see things not as they are, but as we are.
The work is part of a broader line of inquiry about our cognitive biases, our inability to see the world from others’ point of view, and the resulting social and political polarization.
This artificial neural network is trained on images scraped from wikimedia; specifically, the Google Art Project – a brief, incomplete survey of human (mostly western) Art, as collected by Google, Keeper of our collective consciousness. Google sees everything we see, knows everything we know, feels everything we feel. Living up in The Cloud, of all places, it watches over us, listening to our thoughts and dreams in ones and zeros. A digital god for a digital culture.
Tens of thousands of images scraped from the Google Art Project, containing scans from art collections and museums from all over the world. These include paintings, illustrations, sketches and photographs covering landscapes, portraits, religious imagery, pastoral scenes, maritime scenes, scientific illustrations, prehistoric cave paintings, abstract images, cubist, realist paintings and many more – an extensive (yet vastly incomplete) archive of human imagination, feelings, desires and dreams; as cataloged by the Keeper of our collective consciousness, Google.
We have a very intimate connection with the cloud. We confide in it. We confess to it. We appeal to it. We share secrets with it, secrets that we wouldn’t share with our family or closest friends. And Google is the Keeper of our collective consciousness. It sees everything we see, knows everything we know, feels everything we feel. Living up in The Cloud, of all places, it watches over us, listening to our thoughts and dreams in ones and zeros. And now, just as the Church – the previous bastion of our Spiritual Overseer – used to be the purveyor of Art & Culture; now Google – bastion of our new Digital Overseer – is moving into that role too.
2019 GTC 2019 Keynote with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, NVIDIA, Learning to See shown at 0:32, with the voiceover “[AI is] inventing new ways to bring out the creative genius in us all”, 18 Mar 2019· News· Video
2024 Machine Learning Processes as Sources of Ambiguity: Insights from AI Art, Christian Sivertsen, Guido Salimbeni, Anders Sundnes Løvlie, Steve Benford, Jichen Zhu, Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), article 165, pp. 1–14, 11 May 2024· Academic paper
