Earlier than I first moved to the US at 13, my identification was easy: “I’m from Saudi Arabia.” However as I bought older, answering the query “The place are you from?” turned more and more complicated. 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 identification 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 means of my mom’s lovely retelling of our household’s story, I felt belonging.
As I processed the archival photographs via computer vision techniques — utilizing a sort 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 will 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 identification and erasing my ancestral tales and reminiscences.
Nouf Aljowaysir is a brand new media artist based mostly in Brooklyn.
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