The Eyes of AI is a research project diving into the philosophical and social factors contributing to the increasing integration of digital developments in our society and the implications of Artificial Intelligence in connection to camera surveillance. I was curious to discover if AI has advanced its visual analysing capabilities to the point where it can match or even exceed the human eye
This research concluded in a series of animations that challenge us to reconsider our surroundings and the unseen watchers within them; next time you take a dip in the pool or cross the road to work, you might want to look around to see who else is watching along.
Animation 01/03 "A Person in Red. Right?"
Animation 03/03 "Foul Play"
Animation 02/03 "It's All About Perspective"
Surveillance & Artificial Intelligence
The series of frame-by-frame animations consist of frames from derived from livestream camera surveillance footage. Each frame is different to the other, but they all contain a reoccurring element, a person in red functions as the visual metaphor – the red thread – throughout the videos.
For this, I partnered with Daniël Jrifat who developed ‘Red Detection Extractor’, an AI-based application designed to extract frames of people wearing red clothing. This was supposed to make the process of selecting suitable frames for the animations easier. However, as results and conclusion of this experiment, AI appears to be just like humans - and easily makes mistakes. These “mistakes” or “false positives” are included in the final outcome of this project.
Additionally, I experimented with Video-LLaVA, an open-source AI tool that provides text-based visual descriptions based on videos and photos, we can compare our own human analysis to that of AI. Do we see the same things as AI? The same details? Is AI smarter than us? Or does AI get it all wrong?
This publication is a collection of surveillance footage from all over the world and a comparison between my own personal interpretation compared to that given by AI.
The Process of The Eyes of AI
During the process development of this project, I did not only experiment with different AI tools, but also with different animation based methods to discover how I could best translate my views on surveillance into a visual work of art.
Curious to find out more on this project or read my graduation thesis The Eyes of AI: A Visual Investigation Into Camera Surveillance feel free to reach out!