Topic 32, Pose 13, Gesture 2 (shock, surprise, mouth, etc.)
I collected and analyzed 130 million stock photographs to create Taking Stock, a series of photographs and videos that reveal the ideologies haunting these ubiquitous images.
Over the past few years these massive stock image archives have been a key source for training generative AI models. AI tools treat stock photography as factual information, but they are far from neutral. I wanted to know what is in these images? Which is to say, what is AI learning about us?
I wrote code that systematically downloaded every image of an individual person on every stock photo website I could find, along with all their metadata. I used Machine Learning and AI tools to textually and visually analyze these stock photographs. Sorting and clustering the images by thematic topic, body pose, and hand gesture. The image above is from the “shock, surprise, mouth, etc.” thematic topic, with hands posed near the bottom of the face, palms facing away from the camera, pinkies angled slightly towards the camera. To make the final print, the code merges the 64 images at the statistical center of this cluster of images.
I have also made videos. The 9 minute video for the “shock, surprise, mouth, etc.” thematic topic includes all the poses where at least one hand was touching the subject’s mouth. For each of these poses I selected the gestures that contained 100 or more images and sequenced them based on the similarity between faces.