Week 4 — Digest
Fashion
The Yes Men Spoof Adidas
Cultural pranksters and activists The Yes Men, led by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, have recently made fake announcements that Adidas had appointed a Cambodian union leader as Co-CEO and launched a new collection of items pre-worn by factory workers.
This stunt aimed to bring awareness and attention to the working conditions and rights of many of the factory workers supporting the fashion industry. Within a few hours Adidas made official comments denying all of the statements made by the Yes Men.
The Yes Men were brought to the fore in 2004 after Jacques went on BBC, under his pseudonym Andy Bichlbaum, as a spokesperson for Dow Chemical. During the interview Jacques claimed that Dow took full responsibility for the Bhopal Disaster, where a leak in Dow’s production plant exposed half a million people to a highly toxic gas leading to thousands of deaths and many more health complications.
Art & Tech
Litigation Against AI Begins
Artists and image distributors have started lawsuits against the big players in the artificial intelligence space, kickstarting a critical debate on how the rights of artists should be handled by this new technology.
Getty Images and artists are independently suing AI companies such as Stable Diffusion, arguing that the use of images in training datasets is a breach of copyright and that the authors/distributors should be credited and compensated appropriately for such use.
Sarah Andersen is one of the artists suing AI companies for utilising her work in their training dataset. She argues that the overarching framework that should be adopted is the triple-c principle. Under triple-c artists should: Consent, be credited and be compensated for having their work used as training data.
However, the issue doesn’t just stem from an artist’s work being used to train AI but also the fact that the AI is able to easily replicate an artist’s distinct style without their consent. In an interview on the Hard Fork podcast Sarah uses the example of her style being implemented by an AI to generate far-right comics.
In a similar vein this Dazed article questions whether the rise of AI is an existential threat or ally to the workforce.
Houseboat by Crossboundaries
Crossboundaries, an architecture studio based in Beijing, has re-designed a houseboat in Berlin, read the full article from Dezeen here.