Judgement
By Swee Kiat Lim | Student category
“Artificial intelligence (AI) is a big part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. With AI permeating into military, law enforcement, financial, healthcare, transport and education applications, what was once the fancy of science fiction authors has been made real enough to both save and endanger lives. My work seeks to question the role of these algorithms and the power that they hold over people. How much do we really know about the algorithms in our lives? What power do they have over us?”
~ Swee Kiat Lim
Judgement is a series of multimedia works that seeks to question our understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the implications of algorithms making judgements for and of humans. The title is a slight play on words, referring to both the act of a trivial ocular perception as in ‘judging the distance’, as well as the act of a profound moral decision as in ‘judging the crime’.
In Fruits, a Python script was written to generate images that appeal strongly to certain labels – banana, lemon, orange, strawberry. In a way, the algorithm in the script is being asked to draw these fruits. In the resulting images, each piece is titled after the prediction and confidence score given by a ResNet50 classifier trained on ImageNet. The images are confidently recognised by an image classifier but are much less familiar to the human eye.
If humans and artificial intelligence disagree on the most elementary depiction and recognition of mundane fruits, what about the far more important decisions of credit scores, granting parole and criminal sentences that algorithms have already taken over today?
Humanity Detector is inspired by the tragedy of Elaine Herzberg, the first pedestrian death involving a self-driving car whereby the vehicle had allegedly not recognised Herzberg as a human prior to the collision. In the Humanity Detector installation, viewers are judged on their humanity by a live classifier – MobileNetV2 trained on the COCO dataset.
What does being ‘97% human’ mean? What happened to the remaining 3%? What if I am not detected as a human at all? What right does this inhuman machine have to judge our humanity?
Location
ADM Gallery 2
About the Artist
Lim Swee Kiat is currently pursuing his Masters in Urban Science, Policy and Planning at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. Having worked as an AI researcher and engineer, he is both concerned and fascinated by the ethical issues posed by the relentless adoption of AI technologies.
He also have a Diploma in Professional Makeup Artistry, worked previously as a makeup artist and had a brief stint in the art of Thai temple murals, which often makes for raised eyebrows, interesting dinner conversations and lipstick recommendations.