AI BEETLE
AI Beetle is a pioneering AIart series from 2016. The research project starten in 2016 in collaboration with Wyoming University in the AI lab with leading AI expert Professor Jeff Clune. The aim was to fool AIs using convolutional networks and evolutionary algorithms. The project herald WOI Dazzle, but this time it’s not only optical camouflage but rather counter-surveillance by messing up metadata labelling systems.
Frederik De Wilde’s beetles are invisible to the electronic eye. The patterns are generated with artificial intelligence and evolutionary algorithms to fool and mislead AI-systems. The artist’s aim is to develop a contemporary razzle-dazzle style capable of messing up labelling and metadata systems. Hence the beetle is seen, for instance, as an umbrella or butterfly. In a feature for ART PRESS, renowned French art critic and curator Dominique Moulin writes about AI Beetle: “Pattern recognition is a branch of artificial intelligence that De Wilde is investigating. As computer vision devices proliferate, far beyond the industries where they first appeared, he looks for ways to fool them into thinking up camouflages, and he does so using artificial neural networks combined with evolutionary algorithms. The three-dimensional beetles he adorns with the resulting camouflage patterns make it impossible to see them as the work of any machine vision device with artificial intelligence. To the human observer, they are still beetles. The machine no longer recognises them as beetles. Artificial intelligence is used here against itself, reinforcing our ability to look at what a machine cannot see. The still and moving images in the AI Beetle series, presented on the internet, thus belong to a larger body of work associated with counter-surveillance, in an era when artificial intelligence is used to serve widespread digital surveillance.
Another aspect De Wilde addresses with this work is the hot topic of AI and authorship: “The beetles are covered in new patterns created by an algorithm, but the algorithm is hacked, so it tricks itself. I do find that interesting; who is the author of the artificially generated pattern? Is it the artist or the algorithm, or both? Can copyright be owned by non-human entities? Is copyright law holding up against the advancements in technology? And furthermore; can creative algorithms and machines become co-authors in the creation process? Can an AI-generated work or invention attract IPR protection under current rules? Is there a need to shape our understanding and interpretation of authors and inventors as natural persons in view of rapidly expanding AI? What would be the benefits and what are the consequences of such a shift?”
“How do artificial patterns used in AI Beetle make us rethink the relationship between art, science, technology and nature? Is it some form of post-camouflage? Will AI play a role in genomic and CRISPR gene editing technology to design proteins or awaken individual dormant genes? Is biotechnology combined with artificial intelligence reshaping our biological future in the 21st century?”
AI Beetle might as well be a projection of such a future that raises plenty of interesting but also moral and ethical questions. From this perspective De Wilde’s project AI Beetle raises more questions than answers. But isn’t that what radical Art should do? In doing so, he raises numerous ethical questions about privacy and how much confidence we have in the technologies we develop.
Computing Beauty exhibition at Gallery A.dition (located in Walkerhill, Seoul, Korea).
Curator Dominique Moulon
