Global AI Narratives Latin America workshop

 

This morning I attended the Zoom meeting of the first Global AI Narratives Latin America workshop, which was broadcast from Santiago, Chile. It's the first of three virtual workshops hosted by The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (University of Cambridge) and the The Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

This workshop was entitled "AI at the edges of Latin America," and covered AI as represented in literature, art and other media.

It took me a bit to join this meeting, since I first tried YouTube, where I didn't see the translation function, so I joined the Zoom meeting where it worked fine.

I did catch the opening statements by Stephen Cave (Executive Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence), who mentioned this workshop would explore AI as more than merely an engineering problem.

Next up was Kanta Dihal (Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow) who introduced the AI Narratives Project, "a joint endeavour by the Leverhulme Centre and the Royal Society." You can download their report "Portrayals and perceptions of AI and why they matter." (.pdf) Among the topics they were examining include the racialization of robots, published as an article "The Whiteness of AI."

The first speaker was writer Alberto Chimal with a talk entitled “Captured Intelligences.”

He said that speculative science fiction in Latin America tends to frame people as users or even victims of technology rather than originators. For me, what immediately came to mind was the work of Jorge Luis Borges and I wondered how he would have handled AI as part of the magic realist movement.

He mentioned the missteps he's observed, including one Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" where a young wife has her dead husband brought back to "life" in a android simulation. (Interesting to note, that one of the most popular episodes of this series, was the optimistic and positive emotional take on transhumanism called "San Junipero." I've often heard that the hardest thing to do in fiction, I think it was a quote from short story writer Tobias Wolff, is to make goodness interesting, which might explain the paucity of stories about beneficial AI. Iain M. Banks, in his Cultural series of sci-fi stories, has AI minds that work well in governing the post-scarcity, quasi-utopian world he's created.)

A version of this was actually attempted: "South Korean TV broadcaster MBC recently aired a Korean language documentary that centers on a family’s loss of their young daughter, seven-year-old Nayeon. Using the power of photogrammetry, motion capture, and virtual reality, the team recreated Nayeon for one last goodbye with the family’s mother, Ji-sung."

Literature pieces mentioned by Alberto: Los superjuguetes duran todo el verano (Brian W. Aldiss), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke), El estruendo del silencio (Bernardo Fernández), Kentukis (Samanta Schweblin), La segunda celeste en "Manos de lumbre" (Alberto Chimal)

In his talk "AI in the art of Latin America," Raul Cruz, (his painting served as the poster for this workshop), said that images about AI should not be seen as just supplements for other media such as book covers. His works can be as large as 1.5 by 2 meters, and can elicit a response by the viewers approaching them from a distance in a gallery. His art is quite striking along with a distressed metallic palette combined with cultural and mythological figures.

He offered a visual proposal where you might imagine a parallel timeline where Mayan kings still existed but had access to advanced technology.

Soledad Véliz of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, finished with “Good night stories for Artificial Intelligence.” She asked us to view AI as a child that needs to be train in moral values by responsible adults. She cited a paper by Riedl & Harrison to show how this might be done by "Using Stories to Teach Human Values to Artificial Agents." (.pdf) Also mentioned as an example was "The Goldilocks Principle" (Hill, Bordes, Chopra & Weston, 2016).

I have a similar inter-disciplinary approach to the study of AI. Before medical school my background was in graphic arts and creative writing, and I see these experiences as a complement to my scientific training.

Developing the creative narratives, mythologies you might consider them, will be essential to make the public aware of the expansive nature of AI, and not just the realm of red-eyed, killer robots.