AI/AI: Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity

AI art is a really hot topic at the moment. Some people are horrified by what AI art tools can do, others see fascinating applications and lots of potential. But AI art tools are only as good as the people who design them and the images that they are trained with. And that’s where bias can creep in.

The AIAI project tested one AI art tool – MidJourney – to see how well it represented Indigenous peoples and cultures. We organised a series of online focus groups with a group of 17 Indigenous participants all of whom have a strong interest in art and technology. In these meetings we generated prompts by asking the participants to imagine a scene of community life in the year 2050, although this was interpreted with quite some flexibility, both by the participants and by MidJourney. We then generated images with the prompts and spent time discussing the results from an Indigenous perspective.