Women Reclaiming AI

Birgitte Aga (UK), Coral Manton (UK)

POSTCITY

Women Reclaiming AI (WRAI) is a collaborative AI voice assistant and activist artwork made by a growing community of self-identifying women. Creating a platform for collective writing and editing, the project co-creates an AI that challenges gender roles.

Women Reclaiming AI / Birgitte Aga (UK), Coral Manton (UK), Credit: Jürgen Grünwald

WRAI is a response to the pervasive depiction of AI voice assistants gendered as women; subordinate and serving. It aims to reclaim female voices in the development of future AI systems by empowering women to harness conversational AI as a medium for protest.

You can speak to the evolving voice assistant at womenreclaimingai.com and see its visual representation (GAN – generative adversarial network) created from a DIY data set of images of the women participating and other women the collective find inspirational.

Project Credits:

  • Women Reclaiming AI is created by Birgitte Aga and Coral Manton in collaboration with the following community of self-identifying women: Kate Potts, Hannah Wood, Georgina Conroy, Rachel Dobbs, Sophie Mellor, Women of Whitleigh, Camille Aubry, Kathy Hinde, Liz Lister, Heather Marks, Eleanor Jean, Alison, Martha King, Penny Evans, Bex Ilsley, Lisa-Cay Dobinson, Demelza Lord, GT, Janet Vaughan, Guanghua Zhou, Elvia Vasconcelos, Mindy Chillery, Lucy Mulgrew , Katie Day, Tamara, Karen Newman, Louise Latter, Libby Heaney, Louise Paling, Aly Grimes, Rachel Parry, Sarah Todino, Katie Attwood, Clarke, Helen Joy, Gosia Boizec, Katie Finnegan, Rebecca F, layla h, Shelly Knotts, joannnne, Thornhambot, Lucy C, Akeelah Bertram, Jo Chicau, Lizzie Wilson, Tamar Clarke-Brown, Victoria Rooke, Sowon park, Serena, Juan Anali, Martha King, Swetha, Nema , Ane Engelstad, Tine Bech, Kasia Prus, Tash Nikol Smith, Rosa Francesca, Bronwin Patrickson, Nina Ma, nxm, @pindec, Zoe, Emily Jae Hwanxm, Jane Manton Millicent, Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway, Letícia Laxon, Susanne Dietz
  • The project is funded by the Arts Council England and supported by Knowle West Media Centre, Intercity, i-DAT, C. Melidis and C. Smith.
  • This project is presented in the framework of the European ARTificial Intelligence Lab and co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

Biographies:

Birgitte Aga & Coral Manton (UK): The work of artist-technologist duo B Aga and Coral Manton manifests as collaborative workshops, events and installations aimed at (re)claiming conversational artificial intelligence (AI) systems as a medium for protest. It critiques the commercial pursuit of humanizing AI technologies and challenges the bias, stereotyping and pervasive influence embedded within. By activating the public, Aga and Manton re-write and re-imagine the cultural myths of AI and robotics, creating futures mediated by alternative technology.

Their most recent work is Women Reclaiming Ai (2019), an expanding activist artwork, presented as a feminist AI voice assistant, programmed through workshops by a growing community of self-identifying women, and The Infinite Guide (2018), a speculative artwork and research project, powered by a conversational AI, (LSTM Recurrent Neural Net), trained on a biased and non-diverse data set.
https://birgitteaga.com/
https://coralmanton.com/