WhAI (What is AI?)
An Artificial Intelligence (AI) Toolkit for for the GLAAM sector
About WhAI?
GLAAM (gallery, library, arts, archives, and museums) organizations are under tremendous pressure to adopt seemingly innovative “artificial intelligence” tools despite having legitimate concerns about these tools’ social, legal, and environmental impacts. WhAI? will work to develop considerations and wise practices for arts and culture organizations, volunteers, and professionals to help provide a critically reflexive understanding of these emerging tools and can better balance building our sector’s digital capacity through the lens of digital equity.
WhAI? will produce an AI for GLAAM organizations toolkit and will offer a series of digital resources that bring professionals and volunteers together for cross-sector learning.
The BCMA gratefully acknowledges support for these resources from the Canada Council for the Arts,
WhAI? Listening Session
Wednesday, August 14th 2024
10:00 am – 11:30 am PDT
WhAI? Podcast
Information on the WhAI? podcast series is coming soon!
Resource Library
Since more than 80% of Canadians view museums as trusted sources of information, it is important that museum professionals and volunteers stay up-to-date with major technological and societal trends. Below you will find a curated list of readings to help you better understand and critically engage with AI and AI-based tools. As with all technologies, we should carefully evaluate a tool’s benefits with its costs and as you’ll see in these readings, the human cost of AI can be extremely high.
Webinar Recordings:
Resisting Artificial Intelligence Through Anti-Fascism and Indigenous Data Sovereignty
In the past year, we have seen a boom in hype around Artificial Intelligence, or AI. With so many billion-dollar companies promising a coming AI revolution that aims to improve our lives, it is difficult to discern hype from harm. In this session Dan Mcquillan, Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London and author of the recent book Resisting AI: An Anti-Fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, and Jeff Doctor, the Impact Strategist at Indigenous-owned and operated tech company Animikii, will dig into the hidden social, cultural, human, and environmental harms at the core of artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Museums Webinar
Reading List:
What is AI?
From IBM, What is artificial intelligence (AI), “At its simplest form, artificial intelligence is a field, which combines computer science and robust datasets, to enable problem-solving. It also encompasses sub-fields of machine learning and deep learning, which are frequently mentioned in conjunction with artificial intelligence. These disciplines are comprised of AI algorithms which seek to create expert systems which make predictions or classifications based on input data.”
AI and Colonialism:
The impact of AI is repeating patterns of colonial exploitation. From MIT Technology Review, “European colonialism, they say, was characterized by the violent capture of land, extraction of resources, and exploitation of people—for example, through slavery—for the economic enrichment of the conquering country. While it would diminish the depth of past traumas to say the AI industry is repeating this violence today, it is now using other, more insidious means to enrich the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the poor.”
From MIT Technology Review on data-labelling: “The insatiable demand has created a need for a broad base of cheap labour to manually tag videos, sort photos, and transcribe audio. The market value of sourcing and coordinating that “ghost work,” as it was memorably dubbed by anthropologist Mary Gray and computational social scientist Siddharth Suri, is projected to reach $13.7 billion by 2030.”