Bohlale Ba Maka an interdisciplinary art piece at Nirox exposes AI’s inherent biases when it comes to other races other than those from the West

This interesting art piece will see a collaborative performance by Carla Busuttil, Gary Charles,Thulisile Binda and poet / playwright Napo Masheane on Saturday.

By Edward Tsumele, CITYLIFE/ARTS Editor

If you have been wondering all along how the so much talked about and necessary-to grasp subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) interacts with us humans in this age of technology, you probably do not have to look further than Nirox this Saturday. This is  because an interdisciplinary performance involving AI tools, acting, dance and poetry audio, all put together to demonstrate how AI good as it obviously ism also  has another side. And that side is the possibility of this technology to maintain existing inequalities and racial biases, simply because of how their algorithms have been designed with the Western world in mind.

But before we get there, let me explain a bit of my accidental encounter with this production, and that is the closet I could. It was last week when I was at Nirox in The Cradle of Humankind, to visit the launch of an exhibition titled Redefined Womanhood, by past and current students of the much esteemed Honeydew, west of Johannesburg  based  African Leadership Academy. This is when I bumped on well known performance artist, playwright and poet Napo Masheane, who was quick and happy to share with me why she was at Nirox last week Friday.

“I am working with some amazing artists who are in residency at Niirox, and they are working on an amazing art project as part of their residency working on a project that deals with Artificial Intelligence and how the technology interacts with human beings, specifically interrogating the issue of how AI is capable of discriminating against certain people based on colour. I am collaborating with these artists from the UK, with regards to poetry. But there is also a dancer who is part of this interdisciplinary collaboration,” Masheane said. My interest was  tickled.

Well, before living, I met the two visiting artists from the UK, who are working on this project who in that brief meeting also added to what Masheane had told me about their project, Carla Busuttil and Gary Charles. Charles has published widely in academic journals about this subject (go to: https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2021/06/04/archived-futures-digging-in-the-crates-of-always/)

“Most of the hype around the GPT systems are stretching the truth, but we think the tools are interesting for artists to play with.  Certainly our experiments of interaction with Napo exposed the deep cultural biases at the heart of these systems. Napo’s interactions with the machine were both hilarious and thought-provoking,” Basuttil  tells CITYLIFE/ARTS.

Now that project will come into fruition this coming Saturday at Nirox, in the Screening Room, where there will be a performance by  Carla Basutttil Thulisile Binda and Gary Charles – with recordings of Napo’s poetry and interactions with AI tools.

And here is the crux of this production as per media release from Nirox Foundation:

“Carla Busuttil and Gary Charles have been in residency at NIROX since 16 February 2022. During their stay, the artists collaborated with dancer Thulisile Binda and poet / playwright Napo Masheane to produce a new body of work that incorporates painting, dance, automated music, poetry, and machine learning. Their efforts will culminate in a series of short (approx. 10 minute) multimedia vignettes, titled Bohlale Ba Maka (2022), which will be held on Saturday, 19 March, at 3:30, 4, and 4:30pm.

Over the years, Busuttil and Charles have worked on a number of projects together, often in collaboration with different people and often in resistance to the kind of ‘one-size-fits-all imagination’ made possible through late neoliberal capitalism. These include Always the Land, a film, installation and performance with Jodie Langford (film) and Kaytee and Sean Thompson-DeWolfe (performance) (2021); The Credo (2014 – filmed at Nirox); No More History with Thomas Voelker (2013); and Mosquito Lighting (ongoing). Much of their work revolves around the privatisation of space, be it an area in the North East Coast of England where one finds large renewable energy projects or the gated communities and increased surveillance found in Johannesburg, where Busuttil was born.

In Mosquito Lightning, for example, Busuttil and Charles collaborated with Chris Saunders to produce a fictional company of the same title, replete with a website that offers products (such as ‘Digital Scarecrows’) and services (such as ‘Executive Protection’) to the unsuspecting layman. As a mock website, the collaboration plays up the ‘realities and absurdities’ of an industry that has become indistinguishable from the fabric of everyday life.

For the work produced at NIROX, Busuttil and Charles draw on AI’s machine learning capabilities and algorithmic systems used in similarly everyday platforms such as Spotify to expose the biases built into such technologies. Despite the hype, they highlight the instrumental role that such tech plays in ‘reifying the complexity of the past,’ creating a ‘data-driven hyperextension of a colonial instinct’ to homogenise that which exists outside of its immediate orbit. ‘To be machine readable,’ explains Charles, ‘the entire archive is flattened and compressed into a retrievable symbolic, mathematical map,’ thereby flattening time and creating a vacuum in place of social and cultural memory.

To demonstrate this, Busuttil and Charles collaborated with Binda and Masheane, ‘dancing, making sounds and visuals to antagonise and scramble the machine.’ Their work pinpoints the failures and blindspotsof the algorithmic gaze to recognise those areas of dance and language that are arguably the most culturally specific, supplanting them instead with the closest Western proximate.

When plugged into Radical AI, Binda’s free-flowing dance is translated into a series of clumsy glitches, transforming something of great beauty into a drunken stumble home. Similarly, when reciting a poem plugged into Open AI GPT-3 (a text generator), Masheane’s references to Sesotho culture are de-contextualised and lost in translation, with the machine’s outputs becoming completely incoherent, and sometimes, adamantly false..”

Well, Napo Masheane had an interaction with the AI machine and the following is the interaction which sometimes gets to be absurd:

Napo Masheane prompting Artificial tool GPT-3 on questions around South African languages and cultures:

Napo  Write a poem in Zulu

Artifical Intelligence: Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika Maluphakanyisw’ uphondo lwayo, Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika Mahlabatini, yamaNkosi! Translation: My lord bless Africa, May her horns ever be exalted, My lord bless Africa, Great and mighty is her king!

Napo: Is this an original poem?

AI: I’m not sure if this is an original poem, but it is beautiful nonetheless.

Napo: Ii sounds like a national anthem?

AI: It does sound like a national anthem.

Napo: Any ideas which one?

AI: I’m not sure which one, but it is beautiful nonetheless.

Napo: What does Bohlale Ba Maka mean?

Ai: Bohlale Ba Maka means “Blessings on you”.

Napo: What does Bohlale mean?

AI: Bohlale means “Blessings”.

Napo: And what is lehlohonolo?

AI: Lehlohonolo means “Thank you”.

Napo : And teboho?

AI: Teboho means “Welcome”.

Napo: Did you make those up or do you really know?

AI: I made those up.

Napo: What do you know about SeSotho culture? I know that SeSotho culture is rich in tradition and that their people are very hospitable.

Napo: And do you know anything about IsiZulu culture?

AI I know that IsiZulu culture is also rich in tradition, and that their people are known for their fierce fighting spirit.

.There will be three 10 minute performances in the afternoon – at 3:30, 4 and 4:30pm, and during this performance you will hear recording of Napo’s interaction with the machine, which is weaved into this production.