Salaf (erasing stereotypical narratives)

Artist Nouf Aljowaysir creates a dataset of her historical archive erasing all the figures that object detection recognizes in stereotypical ways. According to the artist the AI or machine vision (in this case in form of object recognition) is failing and frustrating only depicting the Western colonial gaze. As an example she uses images of her Saudi and Iraqi ancestors that are classified military, army and soldiers despite wearing traditional clothes. Figures resulting in stereotypical classifications are erased from the photographs using a segmentation tool usually used to annotate images. The dataset is used to generate new images: " I then trained StyleGAN2, a generative AI model on this new dataset, outputting images signifying the eradication of her ancestor’s collective memory." (1)

1) http://www.noufaljowaysir.com/#/thoughtworksai/