Another important aspect that I tried to address in my “Babylonian Vision” work is the question of representation in datasets that are used to train AI. Today, datasets are trained with millions of images governed by large corporations: With ImageNet or Open Images, 80% of the content originates from the Global North. This is visual hegemony. While not being seen may often be a big advantage in the surveillance age, it can also lead to being dominated by Western visual culture.{8}

The number of Second Life users peaked just as Facebook started to explode. The rise of Facebook wasn’t the problem of a competing brand so much as the problem of a competing model: It seemed that people wanted a curated version of real life more than they wanted another life entirely—that they wanted to become their most flattering profile picture more than they wanted to become a wholly separate avatar

DALL·E represents a shift from attempts to reflect objective reality to subjective play. Language is the lens by which we reveal the objective reality known to the neural network being explored. It is a latent(hidden) camera, uncovering snapshots of a vast and complex latent space.