shashasha

The photobook “Typical World” by Japanese artist Taro Karibe highlights the unconscious biases of state-of-the-art AI image-generation technologies.

Using a software called Stable Diffusion, one of the world’s most popular AI tools, Karibe created images of terrorists, heroes, eyes, hands, masculinity, and feminity, as well as more concrete subjects such as Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima. Each of his prompts was preceded by the word “typical.” With image generation AI software basing its output on vast amounts of available photographs, paintings and other images, this approach allows Karibe to dig into the prejucides and biases of humanity’s combined visual unconscious. “Poverty” is symbolized by a black man; the “typical terrorist” is a bearded man with Middle Eastern facial features; “typical love” is expressed through the embrace of a white man and woman; a cow being slaughtered is shown in detail, while the image of a “typical dead body of a human” is completely blurred.

“As such, the generated images seem to be visualizing a world that is entirely fictional, but they do in fact amply reflect social norms, political and religious systems and biases that exist in reality …
In a cave where all light has vanished, it is difficult to discern one’s own shadow from those of other people.”
― from Taro Karibe’s afterword