Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen: Training Humans

“Training Humans” is the first major photographic exhibition dedicated to training images: photo directories used by scientists to teach intelligence systems artificial (IA) how to “see” and classify the world.

For the exhibition the artists explore the evolution of training image collections from the 1960s to the present. Training Humans explores two fundamental issues in particular: how humans are represented, interpreted and codified through training datasets, and how technological systems harvest, label and use this material. As the classifications of humans by AI systems becomes more invasive and complex, their biases and politics become apparent. Within computer vision and AI systems, forms of measurement easily – but surreptitiously – turn into moral judgments.