The Global Digital Cultures Research Group in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's hosts Dr Stephanie Diepeveen, speaking on "Power, Representation and GenAI: A critical exploration of AI imaginaries across language and place"

The persistence of algorithmic bias is well established in scholarship, reflecting, reproducing and reshaping past and ongoing inequalities and injustices. Yet, as technology changes we cannot assume that the same analogies will continue to apply, or that inequalities will necessarily be reproduced in the same or similar forms.

This talk explores the reproduction of bias in text-to-image generative AI models (Bing Create), drawing on the results of a recent collaborative exploratory study of more than 720 image-based outputs of text-to-image generation in 13 languages and concerning 11 countries. It interrogates the gaze of generative AI, and how scholars can indirectly study the opaque operations of generative AI models. To this end, we utilise the notion of ‘synthetic probes’ (de Seta, 2024) to iteratively explore correlations of inputs and outputs within the context of place, language and power. We find striking simplicity in the scope of possibilities through which Bing Create considers the current and future city. Stripping out (explicit) indications of conflict, poverty and politics, we are left with images whose localised diversity harkens back to orientalist imaginaries. Images of the future emerge as one civilising mission or modernisation narrative, with all places headed to one future of hovercrafts, urban gardens and solar panels, encased in a composition of shades of blue and green. This talk presents the argument that the visual outputs of GenAI reflect and reproduce a simple but pervasive and persistent colonial/modern worldview. It explores explanations for this emergent narrative and its implications, suggesting the threat of generative AI is not in its complexity or intelligence, but rather its banality.

Speaker's Info:

Dr Stephanie Diepeveen is a Senior Lecturer in Global Digital Politics in the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London. Her research spans both the (geo)politics of digital infrastructure, and possibilities of relations and spaces that emerge through their development and use. She is particularly interested in perspectives and experiences within and from the Global South. She is a Senior Research Associate with the Intellectual Forum at Jesus College, Cambridge, a Research Associate of ODI, and an Expert with StateUp, a research, data and training company focused on green and technological transitions.