Cognitive Quality Bias

Recently London's Barbican hosted a fabulous exhibition by Trevor Paglen relating to artificial intelligence which gave a fascinating insight into cognitive bias. On display were 30,000 photographs, selected from the 14 million images of the ImageNet data set, giving a visible insight into how artificial intelligence learns, with the exhibit being called "From Apple to Anomaly". For the artificial intelligence engine worked on recognising images and starting, as we might with a small child, with "apple" when teaching the alphabet. The result is a mosaic of images that close up rambles through connections that can be anywhere from fairly obvious through boldly humourous to feeling totally baffling and/or convoluted. Images of apples led to images of orchards but also other, reasonably distinct fruit (Banana?) and images containing a similar blush to that of a ripe Gala (Crisp and very sweet!)