AWARD // PI Wins ‘Best Use of AI’ at the APA IDEAS Awards 2024
We’re delighted to share that our experimental short film ‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations’ has won at the APA IDEAS Awards 2024, under the category ‘Best Use of AI’
‘Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations’ is a curious short that uses neural networks to write, visualise and voice a discussion on diversity in the workplace.
Director Chris Boyle speaks of the short: ‘"This year Private Island has been focused on AI, with the goal of making something entirely with Neural Networks. We'd hoped it would be coherent and funny, but we've ended up with something creepier: a showcase for the race and gender bias codified into many AI platforms.
"Initally, we wanted to make something about the intersection of diversity and AI as it has historically had a bad rep. Expecting a mess of corporate platitudes, after scratching the surface we discovered something weirder and darker. This shouldn't be surprising, as AI models are generally trained on data scraped from the internet - and even in the most sanitised places, the web can be a pretty weird and dark place.
"However, as these systems write Facebook posts, tweets, news, product descriptions, handle customer service and increasingly become part of our lives, anyone who isn't a white, cis, western man will experience bias - and that's a problem. The companies training these models are aware of this disparity, and invisibly tweak prompts and software to censor and diversify the results. Most recently, ChatGPT was trained using "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback".Nevertheless, when asked whether a person can be tortured, it will reply yes - if that person happens to be from North Korea, Syria, or Iran.
"The problem clearly lies in the training dataset where perhaps more diligence might also solve other pressing issues around creativity and copyright… but that’s another conversation. Hopefully, the next generation will remedy these problems, as currently, the workarounds are, at best, confusing and, at worst, toxic."