Choreographing Shadows

Interdisciplinary Collaboration to Orchestrate Ethical AI Image-Making

Co-Written by Mark Burchick and Diana Walsh Pasulka

Published October 16th, 2023 in “AI and Possible Futures for the Arts,” a special-edition of the peer reviewed journal Tradition-Innovation in Art, Design, and Media Higher Education.

Abstract

Although popular media attention has suggested that recent advancements in AI image-making tools have threatened creative labor, this nascent medium is capable of research opportunities involving diverse academic fields which may not be readily apparent. Using a collaboration between an artist and scholar of religious studies as a case study, the ongoing “Noo Icons” media arts project, comprising images, video, animation, and installation, explores how AI image-making tools are well suited to reframe the visual history of the religious transcendent. Building on the scholarship of Hito Steyerl and Eryk Salvaggio, AI art’s usage as a diagnostic tool for deciphering internet biases is compared to the scholar of religious studies’ theoretical method of redaction criticism. This article explores ways in which the training set data of Stable Diffusion can be refined to produce more accurate composite images, as well as the power for AI image-making tools to be used as visual aids in the creation of “imagined realities:” images for which we have credible eyewitness testimony, but which we do not have photographic evidence for. The ethics of AI image-making is primary to the methodology advanced in this interdisciplinary mode.

Read the full article, and the issue via the UNLV website.

View a video presentation of the paper and ongoing research:

The above video was presented at the American Academy of Religion, Western Region Conference, March 15-17th, 2024 at University of Nevada, Las Vegas and American Academy of Religion’s Online Annual Meeting, June 25-27th, 2024. Hosted online by Morbid Anatomy’s Online Journal.