“Can AI Represent Care?” Event Series questions our assumptions around care

In early November, ACRC Academy PhD student Melody Wang and research fellow Nichole Fernandez designed, hosted, and presented their “Can AI Represent Care?” event series. 

The events are funded by Festival of Social Science ESRC and supported by Advanced Care Research Centre, Design Informatics, and Inspace gallery at the University of Edinburgh. The events are also featured in this year’s Being Human Festival.

The event series include:

• an exhibition featuring images of care captured by people in everyday life and those generated by AI;
• a hands-on workshop inviting non-technical audience to learn and use the text-to-image generative AI tool;
• a sharing event where Nichole and Melody shared the research and stories behind the exhibition and exchange viewpoints with the audience (Two PPIE members who had participated in both Nichole and Melody’s research joined the Q&A Session).

The exhibition invited the audience to reflect: "What does care mean in our daily lives?", and "Can AI ever “understand” care?" Meanwhile, the workshop offered an opportunity for audience to gain a first-hand experience of generating AI images around care, and explore the potentials and limitations of this technology. Through these, the events aimed to demystify generative AI, raise awareness of its potential biases, and explore the evolving relationship between humans and AI in shaping our understanding of care.

The exhibition and the associated events were very well-received, drawing over 150 attendees throughout the week. The audience represented a wide age range, from under 16 to over 75. The events effectively brought together members of the public, policymakers, and researchers from a broad array of disciplines both within and beyond the university. These included the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Science and Engineering, as well as Health and Medicine.

Following are a few anonymous comments from attendees:

• This is a wonderful exhibition! I am glad I created time for it.
• Very nice to see both approaches to images of care together. They are using different kinds of display; both were excellent and the variation in presentation (fixed light boxes, multi-screen presentations, flip-style images; both had more interactive elements) worked really well.
• My suspicions about AI generated images have been confirmed, and then some! Really interesting to see how adding constraints such as "male" changes the images. Also loved the real images from real people.

If you want to learn more about the images of care project by Nichole, you can find more information here. If you are interested in AI generated images or the broader intersection of care and technology, you can sign up Melody’s newsletter here. The researcher’s email address can also be found on the corresponding page if you wish to connect or collaborate.