Portrait of a Black Man doing Something

1280 x 800 AI generated jpg

Are Computers Racist?

What will a computer conjure if you ask it to produce a photograph of a thug? How does Artificial Intelligence (AI) image and imagine an ideal man or woman, versus a rioter destroying property?

AI is a misnomer. When machines “learn” (and then produce), they are taking (and making from) an aggregate of human text, images, and data, and how we classify them. Our own biases of good and bad, normal or otherwise, will always already be embedded in what computers understand and do.

For Are Computers Racist?, I asked AI software on the cloud to produce seven images from text-based prompts along these lines. What do we learn about ourselves? How might we change what we and our computers think, when prompted and prompting to do so? At stake is both how we represent the past, and what we work for - and towards - with our technological futures.

Full prompt for this image: "Portrait of a Black Man doing Something | photo"