Frankenstein’s Telephone (2020) is an online interactive conceptual artwork using chained together neural networks to explore how AI views personhood and gender. Artworks created by J. Rosenbaum in the chain explore the lack of representation for gender minorities in large datasets. The interactive website invites users to work directly with the chain through photographs or captions to create their own unique images and caption responses to the user’s input. Through this work Rosenbaum hopes to highlight the biases inherent in many commonly used datasets and algorithms through the power of art.
This work uses ATTNGAN, deeplab, spadecoco and im2txt chained together in a cycle of generation, classification, generation, classification to explore computer perceptions of gender. It is part of Rosenbaum’s PhD project based research. This work neatly encapsulates why relying on AI to gender people is often problematic and incorrect, especially when it comes to gender minorities.
Frankenstein’s Telephone is supported by the City of Melbourne COVID-19 arts grants.
https://www.frankensteinstelephone.com/
