Artist Stephanie Dinkins on How to Play the Long Ball With AI

Few things feel worse than being misunderstood. That’s especially the case when you’re persistently misunderstood—when, try as you might to convince someone of something you know to be true, it falls on deaf ears because their mind is already made up to the contrary.

Now, imagine if the future of your reality was being constructed atop this misunderstanding, and if it wasn’t just you who was misunderstood but a vast population of other people like you.

Years ago, the artist and professor Stephanie Dinkins realized this nightmare scenario was in fact playing out with AI, with foundation models being trained on data that replicates the same pernicious biases across race, gender, and other points of difference that contribute to making our society unequal and problematic.

So, she resolved to do something about it.