What algorithmic art can teach us about artificial intelligence

Prints made by Tom White appear to humans as meaningless blobs, but to AI algorithms they look like specific objects and items. 

Photo: Ramesh Pathania

We live in a world that’s increasingly controlled by what might be called “the algorithmic gaze.” As we cede more decision-making power to machines in domains like health care, transportation, and security, the world as seen by computers becomes the dominant reality. If a facial recognition system doesn’t recognize the color of your skin, for example, it won’t acknowledge your existence. If a self-driving car can’t see you walk across the road, it’ll drive right through you. That’s the algorithmic gaze in action.

This sort of slow-burning structural change can be difficult to comprehend. But as is so often the case with societal shifts, artists are leaping headfirst into the epistemological fray. One of the best of these is Tom White, a lecturer in computational design at the University of Wellington in New Zealand whose art depicts the world, not as humans see it, but as algorithms do.

WHITE’S PRINTS EXPOSE THE WORLD AS SEEN BY ALGORITHMS

White started making this kind of artwork in late 2017 with a series of prints called “The Treachery of ImageNet.” The name combines the title of René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe that isn’t a pipe, and ImageNet, a database of pictures that’s used across the industry to train and test machine vision algorithms. “It seemed like a natural parallel for me,” White tells The Verge. “Plus, I can’t resist a pun.”

To humans, the pictures look like haphazard arrangements of lines and blobs that lack any obvious immediate structure. But to algorithms trained to see the world on our behalf, they leap off the page as specific objects: electric fans, sewing machines, and lawnmowers. The prints are optical illusions, but only computers can see the hidden image.