How Black Women Are Using Creativity to Fight the Biases of AI

Transmedia artists like Stephanie Dinkins are merging art and AI to challenge bias and create more inclusive digital narratives.

Stephanie Dinkins’ installation, “If We Don’t, Who Will?” at Brooklyn’s Cultural District. (Photo by Driely Carter, Courtesy of More Art)

Two women sit facing each other in a well-lit room, swaying their heads and holding eye contact as they discuss. With similarly knotted neck scarves, white tees and shoulder-length hair, these Black women are almost alike, except for one thing: one is human transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins, the other is humanoid robot Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture 48, aka Bina48.

Dinkins started conversing with Bina48 in 2014, four years after it was released, to explore “the possibility of a longterm relationship between a person and an autonomous robot that is based on emotional interaction.” Their long-standing discussions centered on race, gender, faith and civil rights, where Dinkins aimed to provide a Black woman’s perspective to a robot created by mostly white men. Describing her main medium as “conversation,” Dinkins has since done more art projects using technology to create digital memory through storytelling.

In 2018, she trained a deep learning AI model using the oral history of a multigenerational Black family and infused it into a three-faced seashell-like sculpture. By 2021, Dinkins was addressing algorithmic biases with her project, “Secret Garden,” a virtual reality installation filled with the stories of Black women, emphasizing the power of resilience.

“I was thinking about it … all these ways in which we're left out. Well, I'm tired of being left out. My first two works were really about figuring out that all this data is pretty biased and doesn't include good things about me and my people,” Dinkins explains. “Now I'm trying to figure out how to give the world something I think it needs — a Black ethos.”

This year, Dinkins — who is a professor and Kusama Endowed Chair of Art at Stony Brook University and an LG Guggenheim recipient — is taking the algorithm conversation further with her new series, “The Stories We Tell Our Machines,” starting with a public art installation, “If We Don’t, Who Will?” on view now until Sept. 28 at Brooklyn’s Cultural District.

Visitors will be welcomed into an upcycled yellow shipping container illustrated with quilt patterns inspired by the Underground Railroad, particularly the Drunkard’s Path. The container, created in collaboration with LOT-EK, is accessible to the public on the ground level, where people can walk in and interact with bespoke AI systems curated to engage in conversations, providing real-time visual responses.

Photo by Avery J. Savage, Courtesy of More Art)

According to Dinkins, this installation, commissioned and produced by More Art, intends to “infect the techno ecosystem with information about ourselves that is better, more equitable, open and more understanding.” It attempts to expose the limitations of AI systems that have a superficial understanding of underrepresented communities.