Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford Expose AI Training at Osservatorio Prada

Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford's exhibition 'Training Humans' at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan reveals the visual-cognitive training datasets used to teach AI systems biometric recognition. The show, an expansion of a previous iteration at Manifesta in Palermo, presents freely available training tests from research labs and companies, primarily American and Chinese, that have fed millions of facial images into recognition software. The installation, arranged on walls and tables with a historiographic and pathological approach, forces viewers to confront the violence inherent in the commodification of human faces. Paglen, known for his work on surveillance and power structures, continues the tradition of information art pioneered by Mark Lombardi, using his background as a geographer and photographer to investigate contemporary intelligence devices. The exhibition includes a notebook with reflections by Paglen and Crawford on biases that can lead to racist, sexist, and classist AI, though this critique is not entirely novel given existing research on big data bias. A warning in the exhibition notes that visitors' own images from the internet could statistically be among the databases displayed. The show runs at Osservatorio, located in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan.