Artist Lecture

As a computer science major, I am very interested in the developments of artificial intelligence (AI). Dinkins is working with AI to make it more inclusive, as in general AI is skewed towards favorite white men and their views. This is because AI has to be taught, and when the majority of teachers are white men, their biases seep into the code. Dinkins is committed to working with people of color to incorporate diversity into the computer science world.

Dinkins is a photographer, and considers much of her work to be photography. Her journey with AI began when she learned about a humanoid robot that very closely mimicked human mannerisms, and was surprised to find out that she was created in the image of a black woman. She was able to befriend said robot, and routinely visits it now. In conversations with the robot, Dinkins noted that her responses were clearly those learned from white men. It answered questions about race as a white man might, and she wanted to change that. She was able to help out with the robots creators to give it a more diverse point of view. Soon after, she decided she should make her own AI, but did not know much about coding at all, she was a photographer by trade.

Dinkins created a statue entitled "Not The Only One" (pictured below) that contains a vocal chatbot that can communicate with the audience and share the story of a multi-generational black family. It can answer questions, but the answers are often a bit clunky due to the small data set. She doesn't mind this though and has been shocked by how patient people have been with it. Dinkins says that she is trying to recreate her behavior in this bot as she pushes the boundaries of what is expected from her. She is taking up space because she deserves to, and wants the bot to reflect that.

She has another piece "Secret Garden" which is a multi-screen digital work with six women standing in a garden. The women tell their stories and those of their families, the garden being filled with crops from the slave-trade. The stories rotate between the women, signifying that they all have those stories to tell.

She is dedicated to redefining how race and ethnicity are integrated into AI. The default has been set as 'white' for many algorithms, and Dinkins found a great deal of difficulty when trying to identify with the AI. We have spent a great deal of time discussing this in my computer science courses, because it is incredibly important to reflect upon how biases can seep into creations. This lecture has absolutely cemented this idea of diversity in my code into my mind, and I don't think I will forget it any time soon.