Trevor Paglen’s Vision: How AI Shapes Society and Art in the Modern Era

Translation result.■ Trevor Paglen, winner of the Fourth LG Guggenheim AwardAI’s power structures visualized through photography and video“Mechanical image generation…we must guard against its harms”“With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, we now live in an era when art does not necessarily require a human creator behind it. In the past, people tried to filter out fake information. Today, many operate on the assumption that everything might be false, and we search for what’s real,” contemporary artist Trevor Paglen said in an interview on the 14th (local time) at the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, New York.He recalled that when the war in Iran began and he tried to piece together the situation through social media, he realized his own thinking had changed. Paglen noted that machines increasingly generate images for other machines—in self-driving cars, automated quality-control systems in factories, and airport facial-recognition systems. Because humans don’t need to view those images, the shift feels unfamiliar. He warned that this development could have profound cultural, social, and political consequences and urged a careful consideration of how to prevent negative outcomes.A world-renowned media artist, Paglen visualizes the power structures and surveillance mechanisms embedded in AI and digital technologies through photography, video, and sculpture. His 2022 work, “Faces of ImageNet,” used image-classification algorithms against themselves to expose how AI trained on biased data can make discriminatory judgments about people. In 2019, his participatory project “ImageNet Roulette” revealed how AI learns biases about race, gender, and appearance while analyzing people’s faces.In recognition of that work, Paglen was awarded the LG (003550) Guggenheim Award. Now in its fourth year, the LG Guggenheim Award is a flagship collaboration between LG and the Guggenheim Museum that honors artists who drive creative innovation through technology.Asked what the award meant to him, Paglen said, “I hope it can inspire other artists.” He received a MacArthur Fellowship—the so-called “genius grant”—in 2017 and the Nam June Paik Art Center International Artist Prize in 2018. He described his practice as investigative and collaborative: rather than the traditional studio model of painting beautiful pictures, he works with specialists across disciplines on research-driven projects. “I believe this approach can contribute to society,” he said, “and I hope it encourages other artists to broaden their possibilities.”