Whorkshop on Generative AI as a Method in Social Sciences
Two of our researchers have been participating to the “Workshop on Generative AI as a Method in Social Sciences” in Melbourne and online; the workshop was organised in collaboration with Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University and research project Imagining Sustainable Digital Futures (Aalto University, Finland).
Silvia Barbotto has discussed the relation between Generative AI as method and self-perception through one of the activities shared with the silver aged participants during the EUFACETS Workshop in Trento. As a narrative visual-telling and ludic performative practice this experiment focused into the relation between the autobiography and the allucination/anonymisation of images through technologies such as Deep Privacy2 and Camouflage, investigating the trajectory in a latent space to the past and to the possible future with the strategies and technics of textual and passional semiotic. It raises concerns about privacy versus identity preservation, questioning the impact of anonymised images on meaning and ethics, but also the possibility to explore the fantastic memory. The discussion highlights the importance of these issues for the elderly, emphasising memory and the potential risks of narrative distortion. In the same time has been underline the need of inserting the AI methodology in a multimodal semiotic frame, including interdisciplinarity and digital humanity approach.
Laura Boffi, in collaboraion with computer scientist Philipp Wintersberger from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, presented “Exploring pictures based – time travels as a way to prompt intergenerational relationships and meaningful visions of the future for elderly people”, the design of two participatory experiments trying to answer to the following research question: How can critical researchers engage in decolonizing GenAI systems when using them as a method? How can we resist the hegemonic and technology-centered narratives of the AI industry and provide alternatives that frame the use of these technologies as a research method?
They presented the “Photos ping-pong” experiment, which was implemented within the Eufacets users’ workshop on May 17th. According to this experiment, the participants should work in pairs and belong to different generations (young and senior generation). Through the use of generative AI, they would have their personal pictures travelling through time, so that the picture of the senior participant would be transformed into the future context of the young participant and, likewise, the picture of the young one would be transformed into the past context of the senior.
The second experiment they presented was about the possibility of training AI through the specific inputs of senior people, so to be able to question whether AI could produce visions of the future that could be meaningful to them. As this experiment has not been implemented yet, during the workshop they introduced its design.
