Stephanie Dinkins on AI, Artistic Expression, and Making Criticism Count

As an award-winning transdisciplinary artist, Stephanie Dinkins engages with new technologies like AI as they impact our thinking about race, gender, disability, society, and history. If a technology isn’t equitable, can we still use it for equitable ends?

Stephanie’s Bellagio Reflections: “The project I was, and still am, working on is an app that collects and analyzes data in a non-conventional and open way. My focus was on figuring out how to format and collate information such as photographs or stories so that they could become useful data for me and others. I was contemplating cultural touchstones, and how important they are for people to define themselves in the AI ecosphere.

“In group situations, I often observe more than actively talk. But we were a very interesting cohort of residents, and those observations and conversations were both super important to my process. There were people in the field of AI – like Mimi Ohuoha and Diana J. Nucera, a.k.a Mother Cyborg – but there were also folks who were not, like Sherrilyn Ifill, who’s writing a book about civil rights. We had similar areas of interest, expressed through different mediums and outlets, and it was fascinating to compare our approaches.”

Stephanie argues that the need to be critical of AI systems for their lack of inclusivity shouldn’t preclude engaging with them.

As a citizen, I’ve been looking at AI and data since 2014. I came across things within society that made me ask questions about AI systems, and eventually I started to ask how we get these systems to recognize the people who aren’t the main contributors – that is, the people whose data is extracted by a system that is reading and surveilling them, but over which they have no purposeful control. I had questions upon questions about what regular folks might be thinking about AI. Now, though, more recent developments like ChatGPT have made me realize that the question has changed. Now, how do we get people to recognize what’s possible?

I’m part of the DISCO Network, which stands for “digital inquiry, speculation, collaboration, and optimism.” We’re a group of artists, scholars, and other practitioners concerned with racial inequality, histories of exclusion, disability justice, and techno-ableism. We’re folks of color – disabled folks, mostly – and we’ve all realized that AI isn’t about us. At the moment, we’re trying to collaboratively write a book about AI, and through that process I’ve realized that we need to find ways to reorient the narrative. I get the idea of criticism, and holding the feet of the people who make these systems to the fire, yet there are ways we can have impact now that seem to be overlooked.

Initially, we just wanted to get around some of the system’s gates – for example, by using Do Anything Now, or DAN, prompts to get ChatGPT to speak in a Black vernacular as authentically as possible. But it can’t only be about expecting to be represented and criticizing the fact that we’re not. How can criticism alone push the system to act differently? The strange boon of not being represented is that it forces you to think outside the box, which creates innovation that leads to progress. It’s still true that we need to ask for more depth, but we also need to really push emerging technologies, because there are possibilities available to us already.

For example, I’m always thinking about the idea of care, and the data we create to help support the care system. So how do we, regardless of who we are, start to inform that? To me, that means engagement with the system. We know that these AI systems in particular are acting differently than the technological norm and being rapidly impactful. Change is a constant companion, so let’s flow with that change. Ingenuity can be quite powerful. Criticism alone runs the risk of increasing the gulf between what’s possible and what you could contribute. I believe we should do what we can from wherever we are. I don’t want the protest about what it might be doing to drag us down from the opportunity to change it.

Of course, we know that these systems are not necessarily “on our side,” but we also know what happens when creative people who need something to happen get a hold of, and start using, powerful technologies in ways that really serve their communities. It changes them.