Lidia Krawczyk
The artistic and research project Let me help you was created in 2024 as part of a photo editing class taught by Lidia Krawczyk for first-year students majoring in Information Management and Digital Publications at the Institute of Information Sciences at the University of Economics in Krakow. The student team consisted of: Jakub Szczepańczyk, Kamila Misiak, Emilia Piechnik, Iza Ozga, Maria Zubik, Małgorzata Targosz, Julia Targosz, Anna Zawalska, Anna Barczuk, Katarzyna Mazur, Julia Pastuszka, Jan Pierzchała, and Julia Ryncarz. The presented digital animation is a documentation and summary of the results of the task entitled “masking.” It consisted of designing a portrait that would be a reflection on the digital image, its imagined, creative, and constantly modifiable form. The tools used for the work were Adobe Photoshop and the Firefly 3 generative artificial intelligence (GSI) model.
The research problem was to examine how communication between humans and generative artificial intelligence takes place. Under the supervision of the course instructor, students were tasked with examining the mechanism of “reasoning” (generating output based on transformers and the fundamental GSI model) for categories such as woman, man, old age, relationships with human and non-human beings, and the processing of personality categories, character traits, and emotion generation. In addition, questions were asked about the extent of hallucinations (i.e., erroneous output data) of this particular generative model.
The student experiment showed that GSI has biased views and stereotypical images, and often generates hallucinations and noisy output data. The Firefly model, trained on Adobe Stock and images from the Internet whose license rights have already expired, although visually impressive and interesting from an artistic or critical point of view, is not currently equal to the neural network of the human brain, as its creators assure us.