Week 1

In the first class of Hypercinema, we got introduced to the course structure. What surprised me was the amount of AI that is currently used in AI. Aidan showed us https://thispersondoesnotexist.com, which creates synthetic, realistic faces of people using a generative adversarial network. And it made me wonder: someone has been using so much energy from data centers to produce images of people who don't exist. This raises ethical concerns, as many of these photos could be used in online fraud attempts. It's somewhat dystopian to see a world where so much of this happens. I was really excited about this class, but the introduction to AI in the industry made me reconsider it. What is real is that, even though I love art, the reality is that a lot of artwork, especially in this kind of sector, where art and tech are merging, will use AI. There are some good uses of it, but it's challenging to draw the ethical lines, and this is one that directly conflicts, especially in this class, with the use of AI. We also came across Gen3c, a research project, which made me realise more of my qualms with AI use in such a field, because part of what makes art is the hard work that goes into it.