Artificial Stupidity: International Conference

Despite the myths of commercial AI and exaggerated expectations, today’s artificial intelligence is full of flaws, unexpected errors, surprising mistakes, and weird phenomena. AI is stupid. It is both “stupid by design” and “stupid by accident”. Often, digital assistants, chat bots or social robots are programmed to make communicational errors or to act clumsy, naïve, or intellectually simple in order to appear more human to humans. In video games, AI-driven non-player characters are intentionally “dumbed down” in order to prevent constant game failure. While many users are amused and astonished by accidentally ridiculous outputs such as six fingers or three legs on a person in AI generated images, many artists started to intentionally dumb down AI by “data poisoning” as a form of resistance to unauthorized implementation of their works into training data sets.

The conference will address these heterogeneous forms of “artificial stupidity”, especially focusing on the affective, playful, aesthetic and political negotiations provoked by AI failures and dumbing AI by design. Join us on July 25-26, 2024 at the HfG Offenbach!

Thursday July 25, 2024

10.00 am–10.30 am

Welcome and Introduction by Olga Moskatova

10.30am–11.30am

The Beast that Eats Itself: Imagining Model Collapse
Michelle Henning (Liverpool)

11.30 am–11.45 am

Coffee Break

11.45am–12.45pm

Let’s Argue With AI: The Importance of Being a Stochastic Parrot

Elena Musi (Liverpool)

12.45 pm–2.00 pm

Lunch Break

2.00pm–3.00pm

How Machines and Humans See the World: Understanding Visual “Intelligence” Carloalberto Treccani (Hongkong)

3.00pm–4.00pm

“This Is Your Brain on ImageNet”: Embedding and Visual Epistemology Fabian Offert (Santa Barbara)

4.00 pm–4.30 pm

Coffee Break

4.30pm–5.30pm

Folly in Flux: Artificial Stupidity and Changing Viewer Perception in Generative Imagery
​Stephanie Geise (Bremen)

Friday July 26, 2024

10.00 am–11.00 am

Expectable Distortions: AI Image Synthesis and the Aesthetics of Weirdness

Roland Meyer (Bochum)

11.00 am–11.30 am

Coffee Break

11.30am–12.30pm

“Boy, What a Stupid Way to Make Images”: Multimodal Generative Interfaces and “Stupid” Character Impressions
Lukas R. A. Wilde (Trondheim)

12.30pm–1.30pm

Telling the Truth in a Digital Age Clemens Apprich (Vienna)

1.30pm–2.00pm

Closing Remarks & Farewell