Here is my Artefact for Week 3. I’ll discuss the themes in a separate post (hopefully you’ll have some ideas about what the message is here).
Please leave comments here before reading the follow-up post. I’d like to see what people think of the movie coming to it cold 🙂
For a full explanation of what I was trying to get across in this short film, follow this link to the Artefact 1 page of this blog.
I liked the premise, I found it very clever. I found it a little slow but once I discovered the skip 15 sec button aligned with the text it was perfectly timed. I enjoyed how the musical tone reflected the storyline. I think I would have liked an ending that felt more resolved (if that’s the right word), sorry I’m a creature of my environment.
Great video! For me, it speaks about the utopian/dystopian oppositions we’ve looked at in this block, and also how we might consider ‘ethics’ – how might machines ‘understand’ this, the reproduction of existing inequalities, flawed ‘human’ ethics and the problematic nature of putting the ‘human’ at the centre of all this. Really got me thinking!
Super video Matt, and hilarious ! I liked Biesta’s kitchen.
The line of code used to solve the problems of AI was great to, and points to an important debate going on right now about the extent to which we locate solutions ‘within’ the technology itself. One of the groups arguing for an alternative approach is AI Now (https://ainowinstitute.org/), who through various pieces of work are trying to shift the debate towards focusing on underlying social problems, which are often amplified by AI, but wouldn’t necessarily be solved by making AI better.
Kate Crawford’s work includes some useful examples of this (maybe here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2IT7gWBfaE). The argument is: if an image search displays a gender bias for the term ‘doctor’, or politician’, it’s not really a technical issue, it is an already engrained inequality in our society. If we made search display a more equal representation, that would solve the underlying social situation.
This seemed to play out in your video, as the AI simply amplified the questionable ethics of humanity, rather than ‘solving’ our social flaws. Given that ‘AI’ generally refers to machine learning these days, it is tied to human behaviour through ‘our’ data traces.
A really thought provoking piece Matt!
I enjoyed the use of sound and music on your video apart from the originality of bringing together all the alternate realities of cyborgs and cyberculture. At the end, it is always the human considering it from his/her standpoint and never the cyborg.
Thanks 🙂
For the “feel” of each alternative future I went with something from a collection of films/comics/TV shows that I thought would fit.
The Post Apocalypse “feel” was based on the Fallout computer games (that’s why I added the hiss and needle pops to the jazz soundtrack) with touches of Doctor Who (a lot of post apocalyptic stories in the Tom Baker/Peter Davidson/Colin Baker years) and a bit of Mad Max.
The Utopian future was based on things like Metropolis, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Space 1999 and a music track that felt a bit Kraftwerk-esque.
The last, sort of hectic alternative was mostly based on Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis (the main character from the comic even made an appearance) and I figured some annoying DubStep would fit as music for a fast-paced, chaotic era.
Bert Giesta! Bwahahaha!
Fabulous and clever video which really captured the various takes on Tech dys/utopias. The issue around human ethics is really important given the movement of power and money around Humanistic AI: https://www.newworldai.com/humanistic-artificial-intelligence/
Cheers!