About Anna Ridler
Anna Ridler is an artist and researcher whose work focuses on data collection and systems of knowledge. She builds large handmade datasets to train machine learning algorithms.
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Conversations on AI: Anna Ridler
Anna Ridler is interviewed by Jurij Krpan and Pau Waelder for the conference The Future of Living
“I’ve been working with machine learning for about four or five years now. I’ve always been interested in working with large amounts of information and large amounts of data as part of my practice and seeing what stories you can find and translate out. And data sets are so inherent to working with machine learning. It was a natural step to see what was being used by these large systems. And what could I do by making my own data. And then I started to learn more and more about how the actual algorithms and models worked, and then it just progressed on in that way.”
Ridler states that AI can be very beneficial to an artist’s practice, but at the same time she points out the difficulties caused by the cost of hardware, as well as the environmental cost of using the complex equipment required to train an artificial neural network.
“I worry that we have ended up in this system where people will be locked out and because of the cost of training models they’ll rely on pre-trained models or on code that only works on certain machines. So the experimentation that is happening on the edges, where the really interesting stuff is happening, won’t access unless the is an institution who can sponsor you.”
Find out more about the artist’s participation in the conference and her views on AI at The Future of Living.
