2016, digital video, 12 minutes (ft. music by Breaka 5:23, 2022 version)
Machine Learning Porn visualises an AI’s pornographic ruminations with a soundtrack comprising of a historically pioneering, non-binary, A.I. generated voice and a track composed by UK producer Breaka.
Yahoo trained a neural network* to flag and censor sexual imagery from the internet. It
learnt by being fed a dataset of thousands of graphic images, independently working out
what they had in common to make them explicit. This neural network was then reverse
engineered to create the most pornographic imagery from a computer's perspective.
Morphing between the yonic and the phallic, the images created are not gendered in a
binary sense. They flow through the queer spaces between identity, gender, bodies and
sexuality.
*Not Suitable for Work (NSFW) classification using deep neural network Caffe models (Yahoo, 2016) and visualisations using Synthesizing the preferred inputs for neurons in neural networks via deep generator networks (Nguyen, 2016). Inspiration from Gabriel Goh, the machine learning researcher who originally discovered the pairing technique.