Earlier than I first moved to america at 13, my id was easy: “I’m from Saudi Arabia.” However as I bought older, answering the query “The place are you from?” grew to become more and more advanced. Due to college and household, I used to be continually shifting between the 2 nations, by no means absolutely settling in a single place.
In 2020, I began exploring my id in hopes of a solution to this fixed query. I interviewed my mom, tracing my ancestral historical past to the 1800s, and picked up private and archival imagery of my household and the areas they lived in. By my mom’s stunning retelling of our household’s story, I felt belonging.
As I processed the archival photographs via computer vision techniques — utilizing a kind of synthetic intelligence that’s designed to see and perceive visible data as individuals do — I requested the A.I. follow-up questions on what it noticed.
The solutions revealed failures within the type of generalizations and stereotypes, uncovering how prejudice could be embedded in or discovered by industrial A.I. instruments. Within the quick movie above, I transformed the solutions from the A.I. — outcomes like “turban” or “costume” — into easy sentences, creating a personality who my mom and I reply to with our personal private tales.
By juxtaposing oral storytelling with A.I.’s limitations, the movie reveals how synthetic intelligence sees tradition via a simplistic and biased lens, lowering my id and erasing my ancestral tales and reminiscences.
Nouf Aljowaysir is a brand new media artist primarily based in Brooklyn.
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