New Work: Because of You

In a 2022 paper, Can There Be Art Without an Artist?, Dr. Avijit Ghosh and Genoveva Fossas discussed the work of human artists within training data for generative AI tools. In the appendix, they connect the practice of scraping training data without consent to its precedents in the biological sphere, citing the case of Henrietta Lacks:

“Henrietta Lacks is known as “immortal” for a reason – though she died of cervical cancer at age 30, scientists have used her remarkable cells countless times since. HeLa cells, that never stop dividing and hence are functionally immortal, have played a role in some of the most important medical advancements of our time. They were used to develop the polio vaccine, chemotherapy and cloning technology, among others. However, the original cells that started the immortal HeLa cell line were taken from her without her consent or the awareness of her family. Now her family is demanding compensation from Johns Hopkins University who first took the cells. The HeLa cell controversy is yet another cautionary tale about the dangers of cutting out human creators in the pursuit of technology and a lesson in ethics, privacy and consent in technological progress.”

Because of You is a digital video work inspired by this connection, and subsequent conversations between Eryk Salvaggio and Dr. Avijit Ghosh, which began at a presentation on AI and art at SXSW in 2023. Salvaggio produced the images and co-wrote the script with Ghosh, who narrates the film through an AI model trained on his voice to read text. The distortions between lived experience, identity, datafication and generative are the subject of the film’s narrative and production.

Because of You has been was accepted for presentation at the CVPR 2024 AI Art Gallery running Jun 19-21, 2024 as part of the 2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

You can watch the film, and learn more about the thinking behind it, on Hugging Face or at Cybernetic Forests.