Trevor Paglen on questioning the intelligence of AI

Trevor Paglen explores the unseen networks of power that monitor and control us, documenting secret US government bases, offshore prisons and surveillance drones. In the run up to his show at Milan's Fondazione Prada (until 24 February 2020), Paglen collaborated with the artificial intelligence researcher Kate Crawford to launch ImageNet Roulette, an online interactive project which revealed the often racist or misogynistic ways in which ImageNet--one of the largest online databases that is widely used to train machines how to read pictures--classifies images of people. At London's Barbican, Paglen is again examining ImageNet's classifications, starting from everyday objects like apples and moving towards more abstract concepts to arrive at the category of "anomaly". We spoke to him about surveillance, AI and how we can begin to imagine a different future. The Art Newspaper: In 2015, I joined you on a scuba-diving expedition off the coast of Florida to see the fibre-optic cables that carry internet communications between continents.