Description
Pipeline ExquisCollaboration with Juliet van Rosendaal (KU Leuven) & Hina Vuijk
Back in 2018, Crawford and Joler drew attention to the material reality of seemingly immaterial AI systems by mapping out its production process from start to finish. Part of this material reality is the involved labor, not only of developers, but for example also of workers labeling data or users generating feedback data. This has led to concerns such as fair labor conditions for click workers and platform workers, and transparency and privacy protection in collection of user data. What has not been questioned, is the effects of divisions of labor as such on the resulting AI products. **Can we understand the specific configuration of workers (e.g., their number, their tasks, their material and communicative means) of the AI production process to affect the resulting AI system in any possible (epistemological/ethical/technical) way?** To address this question, I propose an experiment which is inspired by the surrealist method of the _cadavre exquis_. To create a poem or a drawing, a group of artists follows a strict procedure in which one after the other adds their part to the artwork, without communicating with the others or seeing what the others have added before. The result of their work can be considered the expression of the subconscious (as the surrealists did), or simply as fun or nonsensical. For the experiment I propose, I will follow this procedure together with at least two collaborators to produce a "pipeline exquis". During the conference, we will present the pipeline, and take it as a point of reference in which a peculiar, “isolated” configuration of workers is imposed, to reflect on the question at stake.
| Period | 1 Jun 2024 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Code as Conversation: Transmedia Dialogues Around Critical Code Studies |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Cambridge, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | International |