Because of You, 2024
Because of You is a digital video work inspired by the story of Henrietta Lacks. The video piece explores links between the datafication of the body and the datafication of human expression by pushing against the limits of diffusion models and other AI tools. For example, AI generated images cannot faithfully generate an image of Lacks’ face, as there is sparse documentation of who she was.
The film is narrated by a digital voice double of Dr. Avijit Ghosh — trained on a short sample of his voice. This regenerated voice describes the abstraction of Lacks’ life into cellular data, drawing parallels to the distortions introduced to his own voice — including the removal of his Bengali Indian accent, unexpectedly replaced with the inflections of a statistically averaged North American.
Salvaggio draws parallels to the “removal of information” from Lacks, in her cells and in her visage, and the removal of information from the images created by humans for training data – hence the embrace of the noisy and uncanny image.
About the Artists
Eryk Salvaggio (cyberneticforests.com) is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work, which is centered in creative misuse and the right to refuse, critiques the mythologies and ideologies of technologies that ignore the gaps between datasets and the world they claim to represent. A blend of hacker, policy researcher, designer and artist, he has been published in academic journals such as Patterns, Leonardo, and Interactions of the ACM, spoken at music and media festivals, and has consulted on tech policy at the national level.
Dr. Avijit Ghosh is an Applied Policy Researcher in the Machine Learning and Society Team at Hugging Face 🤗. He works at the intersection of machine learning, ethics, and policy, aiming to implement fair ML algorithms into the real world. He has published and peer-reviewed several research papers in top ML and AI Ethics venues, and has organized academic workshops as a member of QueerInAI. His work has been covered in the press, including articles in The New York Times, Forbes, The Guardian, Propublica, Wired, and the MIT Tech Review. Dr. Ghosh has been an invited speaker as a Responsible AI expert, at events held by organizations such as SXSW, Trustworthy ML Initiative, AI Risk and Vulnerability Alliance, and AI Village. He has also engaged with policymakers, having spoken to US Congressional Staffers and to the UK Government Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. His research and outreach have led to real-world impact, such as helping shape regulation in New York City and causing Facebook to remove their biased ad targeting algorithm.
For More About the Piece
You can find a more in-depth explanation of the film’s concept, themes and choices on cyberneticforests.com or huggingface.co.