The British taxpayer is now funding the creation of AI drag shows as part of a government-backed move to “queer datasets” that display a “bias” towards normality, according to the founder of the Zizi Show, Jake Elwes.
The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London – a government entity – is exhibiting the show, which is effectively just AI-generated pictures, called a “deepfake drag cabaret”.
“It’s exploring the intersection of drag performance and artificial intelligence”, explained Elwes, whose pronouns are “he/they/fae”. It is unclear what that means.
“Basically the idea is that artificial intelligence has a lot of issues. We’ve been trained on data sets that have a bias towards normativity…. My idea was, what if we trained AI just on images of otherness, on queerness, on difference?” he said.
Elwes explains that “queer[ing] datasets, demystifying and subverting predominantly cisgender and straight AI systems” is his driving purpose.
The Zizi Show is part of The New Real, an AI hub funded by the British and Scottish governments via ‘Creative Scotland’, the Scottish Funding Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Creative Informatics, and the Data-Driven Innovation programme of the South East Scotland City and Region Deal.
