The Canon of Latent Spaces

About

The project “The Canon of Latent Spaces: How Large AI Models Encode Art and Culture” is a 4-year project funded under the Ambizione research grant funding scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation. The project started in November 2023 and is hosted by the Institute of Art History, as well as supported by the Digital Society Initiative of the University of Zurich.

The project is focused on exploring various aspects of multimodal AI technologies in the context of art and culture. Multimodal foundation and generative AI models are currently gaining enormous attention not only within the AI community, but also among a broad scope of scholars, artists and practitioners fascinated with this technology. The range of potential applications of these technologies is wide and manifold, but so are the various cultural, societal, ethical and political impacts of these technologies.

Trained on millions of image-text pairs sampled from the internet, multimodal foundation models integrate and propagate various biases, often including dominant societal perspectives and selective cultural memories. These models encode in a numerical hyperdimensional feature space (i.e. latent space) numerous and complex associations which exist between data items collected at a certain point in time. However, which associations are “remembered” and which are “forgotten” - in other words, what constitutes the canon of the latent spaces of multimodal foundation and generative AI models and how to systematically explore them, emerges as a new and exciting research challenge.

The goal of this project is to conduct a holistic and multiperspectival analysis of multimodal AI technologies, particularly focusing on questions related to explainability and the critical analysis of their development and use, as well as their impact on artistic and cultural production. The project aims to integrate diverse outlooks and incite interdisciplinary debates on the globally relevant topic of AI-based content generation and its far-reaching implications on the future of art, culture and society.