JULIA SCHNEIDER

In my comic essays, I expand on complex topics at the intersection of society, economy, art and new technology such as AI, blockchain or non-fungible tokens.

Already in my first and so far most popular comic essay [weneedtotalk.ai] “We Need to Talk, AI”, together with Lena Kadriye Ziyal, I discuss and ask how AI is changing our everyday life, how it could or should fundamentally influence our lives in the future – and that it makes sense to participate in the debate about the best possible AI for all.

The following comic essays also deal with complex, perhaps somewhat scary, but important topics: e.g. [moneymatters.art] money (with Pauline Cremer and Miriam Beblo), [nonfungiblecomics.org] Non-Fungible Tokens (with Noelle Kröger), [schokofakes.ai] young people’s perspectives on AI (with Nele Konopka and Kristina Laube) or the question of social progress through blockchains.

This is an artistic research project I did especially for herri on the topic of AI and bias. I will briefly explain – because I deliberately chose to illustrate an AI – dall-e 2 – to illustrate the resulting comic essay. Using the BIAS inherent in the algorithm.

Here’s how I proceeded: I entered the exact text of each panel (image-text tile) as a so-called “prompt” into the image generation program, flanked by an aesthetic instruction: vaporwave (a genre of psychedelic music and art of net culture). The dall-e 2 program always gives four images to choose from.

For the selection of the final image, which you can now see in the comic essay, I followed a simple set of rules in order to avoid opposing or distorting the BIAS as much as possible with my own BIAS: for the first panel, I used the image on the far right, for the second panel the image on the far left, for the third panel again the image on the far right, and so on. The result is the final comic “AI in a Biased World”.

As a bridge builder between intellect and intuition, I want to encourage people to form their own opinions – and to get involved in discussions. Therefore, accessibility of knowledge is also very important to me, so I often use open licenses, like here.

Get in touch if you too want to tackle complex issues with creativity and respect – and if you’re bored of clichés. I really enjoy such company. Get in touch: [docjsnyder.net].