The spaces of Fondazione Prada Osservatorio become the backdrop to the new photo exhibition “Training Humans” conceived by AI researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen and focused on the images used by scientists to teach how the Artificial Intelligence systems work. “Training Humans” is the first large-size photo exhibition dedicated to training images, the pictures used by scientists from 1970s up to modern days to “teach” artificial intelligence systems how to see and classify images for facial recognition.

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“Training Humans” analyses the mistakes, the prejudice, the suppositions and the ideological positions connected to the development and use of Artificial Intelligence in daily life. The exhibition explores two fundamental issues: how humans are represented, interpreted and codified through training datasets, and how technological systems harvest, label and use these contents. Crawford and Paglen paid particular attention to classificatory taxonomies related to human emotions. Based on the heavily criticized theories of psychologist Paul Ekman, who claimed that the breadth of the human feeling could be boiled down to six universal emotions, AI systems are now measuring people’s facial expressions to assess everything from mental health, whether someone should be hired, to whether a person is going to commit a crime.