Trevor Paglen, the artist who looks where we cannot see: from the secret prisons of the CIA to the images that feed artificial intelligence

In the not too distant future, an article like this one in front of you will no longer be displayed on your screen, an identical piece, with the same words and the same images for the reader in Madrid and for the reader in Buenos Aires. Soon, artificial intelligence will produce specific content for the specific individual, a person with her first and last name, one meter seventy-five centimeters tall, an amateur handball player and with a marked interest in topics related to science. If a few years ago most of the applications of computer vision (which teaches machines to understand images just as humans do) and artificial intelligence consisted of “collecting some type of data to process it in order to extract value of them, like understanding something about your personality to sell you something or installing a camera system to direct a drone or a car, now, with generative AI, it is not just about gathering information to do something with it, but about producing images , texts and materials intended for human consumption.”

The person who warns of this turn in the dizzying evolution of AI is the American creator Trevor Paglen, who has been researching for years at the intersection where art and technology intersect. “You may like the color blue and I like green, so for you an image will be generated attached to the article designed to appeal to your tastes and preferences,” explains the conceptual artist in front of a tortilla skewer on the terrace of Matadero Madrid, where last Thursday the 1st he gave a talk entitled Machine Visions, about the origin of AI, and where it has a video installation that can be visited until February 25. “And that's just the basics,” she stresses. “The types of media that are gaining traction on the internet are those specifically designed to pull on our emotions and manipulate us, and I believe that generative AI opens up a world of possibilities that will make the algorithms of Facebook and TikTok seem small in comparison. And that is something that worries me,” he adds, later finishing: “There is a conspiracy theory that has become very popular in the last decade, which says that we live in a simulation, that nothing is real and that everything is manipulates, and sometimes I think that's true.”

Born and raised in different American bases and trained as a geographer, Paglen began his artistic career focused on images related to the military apparatus: he has photographed secret places and landscapes that supposedly do not exist, underwater cables, surveillance systems, drones and satellites… In other words , has dedicated itself to making visible what is usually invisible to our eyes, looking at the systems that look at us. “I started with CIA operations during the War on Terror: I was trying to understand how they worked and where the secret prisons that the CIA had around the world were located,” he explains. “From there I went on to work with drones, and I spent a lot of time working with Laura Poitras [directora de documentales como Citizenfour, sobre el denunciante Edward Snowden] on issues related to the US National Security Agency [NSA por sus siglas en inglés] and with the fact that the internet was becoming a tool of mass surveillance. But after a while I realized that there is something much bigger than the NSA called Google, called Amazon, called Microsoft.”

Behold These Glorious Times! (behold these glorious times!), Paglen's installation in Matadero Madrid, proposes an immersion in artificial intelligence systems that use computer vision (computer vision), trained based on cascades of images to which humans do not have access, because they are created by computers for the consumption of the computers themselves. Again, the paradox of the visible that cannot be seen. But also images as a language and as a means of mass manipulation, now fragmented into 8,000 million people.

Created in 2017 (that is, it could already be considered a “dinosaur” in terms of the evolution of AI), this video piece is based on models capable of recognizing different types of flowers. With endless images that follow one after another, little by little the visual flow “becomes more and more personal and strange.” The system begins to see images of household objects and faces until reaching intimate images of people with their children, or in their rooms. “The installation tells the story of a kind of add-on in technology, a leap from the point where it is conceived as a means of classifying things until it becomes something designed to extract some kind of value from the act of looking at moments. most intimate of your life.”

Paglen takes his time answering questions. She stops, reflects and shoots. After all, it talks about enormously complex topics, concepts that slip through the fingers of most of us mortals who go through our lives immersed up to our necks in technology, but who are at the same time profoundly ignorant of its operation and its consequences. consequences. With the law, it is said that ignorance does not exempt from compliance, but in the case of artificial intelligence Paglen believes that, no matter how much each of us incessantly feeds the beast with all kinds of photographs, videos and personal information, We should not bear the responsibility for the (mis)use that large corporations make of it.

“The models are trained with data from the past, which people uploaded to the internet when there was no AI yet, so is it fair for these companies to travel back in time and tell you that you gave your consent to something that didn't even exist then? ?”, Paglen asks. “And this is an issue that concerns everything related to cloud-based technologies, because normally you do things in a context, and this context can change in the future.”

It could be said that this same concept, that of context, constitutes one of the master pillars that support the artistic practice of the American, who works between New York and Berlin (although last week he was traveling halfway around the world, from Madrid to Texas). “Things don't happen in a vacuum,” he emphasizes. “That is, what we are asked to believe or perceive always comes from some type of economic or political interest, and these tend to be quite reactionary.” Although humans are behind artificial intelligence, it is important to know who those humans specifically are and what exactly they are looking for. Hence the importance of investigating, sharing, raising awareness. In this case, with art as a vehicle. “I think it's very valuable to look at the world from as many perspectives as possible,” notes Paglen. “Because I think that possibly that is the best way we have to get to something that is close to the truth. And for me, art can be of enormous help to achieve this.”

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