512x512 | Arthur Chopin

Evelyn Kreutzer:

Arthur Chopin’s film investigates generative AI images and the biases and aesthetic and ethical truths they might reveal about our collective knowledge – the knowledge that feeds AI. It is important to note that the film (like any treatment of new technologies that develop at rapid speed) can only present a small glimpse into a specific moment in AI history and that the datasets used for the specific AI-generated images that are reproduced in the film are not reflective of «everything that exists in the world-wide web». Nonetheless, it still holds up a highly evocative mirror to our collective image culture, especially with respect to images involving nudity and atrocities. I consider Arthur Chopin’s film “unwatchable” in several ways: first, I haven’t been able to watch it all the way through without closing my eyes at least two or three times when the images on screen were too disturbing. Second, it deals with “unwatchable” images that stand behind or inform those that we are technically watching, for they are generated out of databases of countless pre-existing images that are somehow there and not there, somehow familiar and foreign – the ultimate uncanny. This uncanniness connects them to even more images in our memories of similar (or similarly disturbing) material, even if that material wasn’t directly recycled here. My own uneasiness about seeing some of the images in this film that the maker (re)produces, makes me wonder about an ethics of AI imagery that we have yet to develop. Is it ethically “okay” to reproduce and consume objectifying, exploitative, or abusive images when in- and of itself do not show “real” human beings? Does the question of “real” or “not real” human beings even matter when the images are generated out of pre-existing images that very well did show real human beings (although that is already put into question as AI-generated content now feeds itself more and more)? And do any of these questions only take away the focus from what we should really be focusing on, which is the power inequalities and abuses inherent in the datasets?

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512x512 | Video Essay | Arthur Chopin | FR 2024 | 21' | Visions du Réel Nyon 2024