ELLIS Alicante and Don’t Delete Art collaborate on the intersection between AI and Art
Rebeca de Miguel
Head of Operations of ELLIS Alicante
The collaboration will focus on online protection of artistic freedom
ELLIS Alicante in Spain and the Don’t Delete Art initiative in the USA have joined forces to foster the responsible development of trustworthy, human-centric Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the context of art. Both institutions have pledged to give visibility to the negative societal implications of today’s AI systems, particularly content moderation algorithms used in social media platforms.
ELLIS Alicante (ELLIS for European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) is a non-profit foundation working on ethical and responsible AI research for social good. Don’t Delete Art is a collaborative project bringing together the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Art & Culture Advocacy Program (USA), PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection (USA), Freemuse (DK) and individual artist-activists. The project advocates for the freedom of artistic expression online.
The first stage of collaboration focuses on analysing the impact and scope of art censorship by content moderation algorithms on social media and on developing potential solutions in support of artistic freedom (https://ellisalicante.org/censorship).
This international alliance is based on open dialogue and the shared vision of the need for the responsible and ethical development of AI systems that place human rights at their center.
Dr. Oliver, Director of ELLIS Alicante, emphasized that “serving, protecting, and fostering fundamental human rights should always be at the core when developing and deploying AI systems”. She highlighted that “At ELLIS Alicante, we are extremely proud of our growing network of international collaborators. Working together for the common good is the best way to drive and achieve positive societal change. We are tremendously excited about this new alliance with Don’t Delete Art, whose expertise on art censorship will certainly strengthen our research on this topic. We also plan to engage in joint outreach activities to spread the word and gather support globally”.
Elizabeth Larison, Director of NCAC’s Arts & Culture Advocacy Program and DDA collaborator added, “Social media companies are well aware of the shortcomings of the existing AI tools they use to enforce content moderation policies, but they have little financial incentive to improve them in order to protect access to art posted on their platforms. We are heartened by the mission of ELLIS Alicante to develop better tools to help identify images within their artistic context. We believe this collaboration will be meaningful in the development of new standards for the field.”