Tag: Kingston school of art

💬 Behind the Image with Yutong from Kingston School of Art

Student Steward

This year, we collaborated with Kingston School of Art to give MA students the task of creating their own better images of AI as part of their final project. 

In this mini-series of blog posts called ‘Behind the Images’, our Stewards are speaking to some of the students that participated in the module to understand the meaning of their images, as well as the motivations and challenges that they faced when creating their own better images of AI. Based on our assessment criteria, some of the images will also be uploaded to our library for anyone to use under a creative commons licence. 

In our third and final post, we go ‘Behind the Image’ with Yutong about her pieces, ‘Exploring AI’ and ‘Talking to AI’. Yutong intends that her art will challenge misconceptions about how humans interact with AI.

You can freely access and download ‘Talking to AI’ and both versions of ‘Exploring AI’ from our image library.

Both of Yutong’s images are available in our library, but as you might discover below, there were many challenges that she faced when developing these works. We greatly appreciate Yutong letting us publish her images and talking to us for this interview. We are hopeful that her work and our conversations will serve as further inspiration for other artists and academics who are exploring representations of AI.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and what drew you to the Kingston School of Art?

Yutong is from China and before starting the MA in Illustration at Kingston University, she completed an undergraduate major in Business Administration. What drew Yutong to Kingston School of Art was its highly regarded reputation for its illustration course. On another note, she enjoys how the illustration course at Kingston balances both the commercial and academic aspects of art – allowing Yutong to combine her previous studies with her creative passions. 

Could you talk me through the different parts of your images and the meaning behind them?

In both of her images, Yutong wishes to unpack the interactions between humans and AI – albeit from two different perspectives.

‘Talking to AI’

Firstly, ‘Talking to AI’ focuses on more accurately representing how AI works. Yutong uses a mirror to reflect how our current interactions with AI are based on our own prompts and commands. At present, AI cannot generate content independently so it reflects the thoughts and opinions that humans feed into systems. The binary code behind the mirror symbolises how human prompts and data are translated into computer language which powers AI. Yutong has used a mirror to capture an element between humans and AI interaction that is overlooked – the blurred transition between human work to AI generation.

‘Exploring AI’

Yutong’s second image, ‘Exploring AI’ aims to shed light on the nuanced interactions that humans have with AI on multiple levels. Firstly, the text, ‘Hi, I am AI’ pays homage to an iconic phrase in programming (‘Hello World’) which is often the first thing any coder learns how to write and it also forms the foundations of a coder’s understanding of a programming language’s syntax, structure, and execution process. Yutong thought this was fitting for her image as she wanted to represent the rich history and applications of AI which has its roots in basic code. 

Within ‘Exploring AI’, each grid square is used to represent the various applications of AI in different industries. The expanded text across multiple grid squares demonstrates how one AI tool can have uses across different industries – ChatGPT is a prime example of this.

However, Yutong wants to also draw attention to the figures within each square which all interact with AI in complex and different ways. For example, some of the body language of the figures depict them to be variously frustrated, curious, playful, sceptical, affectionate, indifferent, or excited towards the text, ‘Hi, I am AI’.

Yutong wants to show how our human response to AI changes and varies contextually and it is driven by our own personal conceptions of AI. From her own observations, Yutong identified that most people either have a very positive or very negative opinion towards AI – but not many feel anything in between. By including all the different emotional responses towards AI in this image, Yutong hopes to introduce greater nuance into people’s perceptions of AI and help people to understand that AI can evoke different responses in different contexts. 

What was your inspiration/motivation for creating your images?

As an illustrator, Yutong found herself surrounded by artists that were fearful that AI would replace their role in society. Yutong found that people are often fearful of the unknown and things they cannot control. Therefore, being able to improve understanding of what AI is and how it works through her art, Yutong hopes that she can help her fellow creators face their fears and better understand their creative role in the face of AI. 

Through her art, ‘Exploring AI’ and ‘Talking to AI’, Yutong intends to challenge misconceptions about what AI is and how it works. As an AI user herself, she has realised that human illustrators cannot be replaced by AI – these systems are reliant on the works of humans and do not yet have the creative capabilities to replace artists. Yutong is hopeful that by being better educated on how AI integrates in society and how it works, artists can interact with AI to enhance their own creativity and works if they choose to do so. 

Was there a specific reason you focused on dispelling misconceptions about what AI looks like and how Chat-GPT (or other large language models) work? 

Yutong wanted to focus on how AI and humans interact in the creative industry and she was driven by her own misconceptions and personal interactions with AI tools. Yutong does not intend for her images to be critical of AI. Instead, she envisages that her images can help educate other artists and prompt them to explore how AI can be useful in their own works. 

Can you describe the process for creating this work?

From the outset, Yutong began to sketch her own perceptions and understandings about how AI and humans interact. The sketch below shows her initial inspiration. The point at which each shape overlaps represents how humans and AI can come together and create a new shape – this symbolises how our interactions with technology can unlock new ideas, feelings and also, challenges.

In this initial sketch, she chose to use different shapes to represent the universality of AI and how its diverse application means that AI doesn’t look like one thing – AI can underlay an automated email response, a weather forecast, or medical diagnosis. 

Yutong’s initial sketch for ‘Talking to AI’

The project aims to counteract common stereotypes and misconceptions about AI. How did you incorporate this goal into your artwork? 

In ‘Exploring AI’, Yutong wanted to introduce a more nuanced approach to AI representation by unifying different perspectives about how people feel, experience and apply AI in one image. From having discussions with people utilising AI in different industries, she recognised that those who were very optimistic about AI, didn’t recognise its shortfalls – and the same vice-versa. Yutong believes that humans have a role to help AI reach new technological advancements and AI can also help humans flourish. In Yutong’s own words, “we can make AI better, and AI can make us better”. 

Yutong found talking to people in the industry as well as conducting extensive research about AI very important to ensure that she could more accurately portray AI’s uses and functions. She points to the fact that she used binary code in ‘Talking to AI’ after researching that this is the most fundamental aspect of computer language which underpins many AI systems. 

What have been the biggest challenges in creating a ‘better image of AI’? Did you encounter any challenges in trying to represent AI in a more nuanced and realistic way?

Yutong reflects on the fact that no matter how much she rethought or restarted her ideas, there was always some level of bias in her depiction of AI because of her own subconscious feelings towards the technology. She also found it difficult to capture all the different applications of AI, as well as the various implications and technical features of the technology in a single visual image. 

Through tackling these challenges, Yutong became aware of why Better Images of AI is not called ‘Best Images of AI’ – the latter would be impossible. She hopes that while she could not produce the ‘best image of AI’, her art can serve as a better image compared to those typically used in the media.

Based on our criteria for selecting images, we were pleased to accept both your images but asked you if it was possible to make amendments to ‘Exploring AI’ to make the figures more inclusive. What do you think of this feedback and was it something that you considered in your process? 

In Yutong’s image, ‘Exploring AI’, Better Images of AI made a request if an additional image could be made including these figures in different colours to better reflect the diverse world that we live in. Being inclusive is very important to Better Images of AI, especially as visuals of AI and those who are creating AI, are notoriously unrepresentative.

Yutong agreed that this development would be better to enhance the image and being inclusive in her art is something she is actively trying to improve. She reflects on this suggestion by saying, ‘just as different AI tools are unique, so are individual humans’. 

The two versions of ‘Exploring AI’ available on the Better Images of AI library

How has working on this project influenced your own views about AI and its impact? 

During this project, Yutong has been introduced to new ideas and been able to develop her own opinions about AI based on research from academic journals. She says that informing her opinions using sources from academia was beneficial compared to relying on information provided by news outlets and social media platforms which often contain their own biases and inaccuracies.

From this project, Yutong has been able to learn more about how AI could incorporate into her future career as a human and AI creator. She has become interested in the Nightshade tool that artists have been using to prevent AI companies using their art to train their AI systems without the owner’s consent. She envisages a future career where she could be working to help artists collaborate with AI companies – supporting the rights of creators and preserving the creativity of their art. 

What have you learned through this process that you would like to share with other artists and the public?

By chatting to various people interacting and using AI in different ways, Yutong has been introduced to richer ideas about the limits and benefits of AI. Yutong challenges others to talk to people who are working with AI or are impacted by its use to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the technology. She believes that it’s easy to gain a biased opinion about AI by relying on the information shared by a single source, like social media, so we should escape from these echo chambers. Yutong believes that it is so important that people diversify who they are surrounding themselves with to better recognise, challenge, and appreciate AI. 

Yutong (she/her) is an illustrator with whimsical ideas, also an animator and graphic designer.

👤 Behind the Image with Ying-Chieh from Kingston School of Art

Student Steward

This year, we collaborated with Kingston School of Art to give MA students the task of creating their own better images of AI as part of their final project. 

In this mini-series of blog posts called ‘Behind the Images’, our Stewards are speaking to some of the students that participated in the module to understand the meaning of their images, as well as the motivations and challenges that they faced when creating their own better images of AI. Based on our assessment criteria, some of the images will also be uploaded to our library for anyone to use under a creative commons licence. 

In our first post, we go ‘Behind the Images’ with Ying-Chieh Lee about her images, ‘Can Your Data Be Seen’ and ‘Who is Creating the Kawaii Girl?’. Ying-Chieh hopes that her art will raise awareness of how biases in AI emerge from homogenous datasets and unrepresentative groups of developers who can create AI to marginalise members of society, like women. 

You can freely access and download ‘Who is Creating the Kawaii Girl’ from our image library by clicking here.

‘Can Your Data Be Seen’ is not available in our library as it did not match all the criteria due to challenges which we explore below. However, we greatly appreciate Ying-Chieh letting us publish her images and talking to us. We are hopeful that her work and our conversation will serve as further inspiration for other artists and academics who are exploring representations of AI.

Can you tell us a bit about your background, and what drew you to the MA at Kingston University?

Ying-Chieh originally comes from Taiwan and has been creating art since she was about 10 years old. In her undergraduate, Ying-Chieh studied sculpture and then worked for a year. Whilst working, Ying-Chieh really missed drawing so decided to start freelance illustration but she wanted to develop her art skills further which led Ying-Chieh to Kingston School of Art. 

Could you talk me through the different parts of your images and the meaning behind them?

‘Can Your Data Be Seen?’

‘Can Your Data Be Seen?’ shows figures representing different subjects in datasets, but the cast light illustrates how only certain groups are captured in the training of AI models. Furthermore, the uniformity and factory-like depiction of the figures criticises how AI datasets often quantify the rich, lived experiences of humans into data points which do not capture the nuances and diversity of many human individuals. 

Ying-Chieh hopes that the image highlights the homogeneity of AI datasets and also draws attention to the invisibility of certain individuals who are not represented in training data. Those who are excluded from AI datasets are usually from marginalised communities, who are frequently surveilled, quantified and exploited in the AI pipeline, but are excluded from the benefits of AI systems due to the domination of privileged groups in datasets. 

‘Who’s Creating the Kawaii Girl’

In ‘Who’s Creating the Kawaii Girl’, Ying-Chieh shows a young female character in a school uniform which represents the Japanese artistic and cultural ‘Kawaii’ style. The Kawaii aesthetic symbolises childlike innocence, cuteness, and the quality of being lovable. Kawaii culture began to rise in Japan in the 1970s through anime, manga and merchandise collections – one of the most recognisable is the Hello Kitty brand. The ‘Kawaii’ aesthetic is often characterised by pastel colours, rounded shapes, and features which evoke vulnerability, like big eyes and small mouths. 

In the image, Ying-Chieh has placed the Kawaii Girl in the palm of an anonymous, sinister figure – this suggests a sense of vulnerability and power over the Girl. The faint web-like pattern on the figures and the background symbolises the unseen influence that AI has on how media is created and distributed that often reinforce stereotypes or facilitates exploitation. The image criticises the overwhelmingly male-dominated AI industry who frequently use technology and content generation tools to reinforce ideologies about women being controlled and subservient to men. For example, there has been a rise in nonconsensual deep fake pornography created by AI tools and also regressive stereotypes about gender roles being reinforced by information provided by large language models, like ChatGPT. Ying-Chieh hopes that ‘Who’s Creating the Kawaii Girl’ will challenge people to think about how AI can be misused and its potential to perpetuate harmful gender stereotypes that sexualise females. 

What was the inspiration/motivation for creating your image, ‘Can Your Data Be Seen’ and ‘Who’s Creating the Kawaii Girl?’? 

At the outset, Ying-Chieh wasn’t very familiar with AI or the negative uses and implications of the technology. To explore how it was being used, she looked on Facebook and found a group that was being used to share lots of offensive images of women which were generated by AI. When interrogating the group further, she realised that the group was not small, indeed, it had a large number of active users –  which were mostly men. This was Ying-Chieh’s initial inspiration for the image, ‘Who’s Creating the Kawaii Girl?’. 

However, this Facebook group also prompted Ying-Chieh to think deeper about how the users were able to generate these sexualised images of women and girls so easily. A lot of the images represented a very stereotypical model of attractiveness which prompted her to think about how the underlying datasets of these AI models were most probably very unrepresentative which reinforced stereotypical standards of beauty and attractiveness. 

Was there a specific reason you focussed on issues like data bias and gender oppression related to AI?

Gender equality has always been something that Ying-Chieh has been passionate about, but she had never considered how the issue related to AI. She came to realise how its relationship wasn’t that different to other industries which oppress women because AI is fundamentally produced by humans and fed by data that humans have created. Therefore, the problems with AI being used to harm women are not isolated in the technology, but rooted in systemic social injustices that have long mistreated and misrepresented women and other marginalised groups.

Ying-Chieh’s sketch of the AI ‘bias loop’

In her research stages, Ying-Chieh explored the ‘bias loop’ which represents how AI models are trained on data selected by humans or derived from historical data which will create biased images. At the same time, the images created by AI will serve as new training data, which will further embed our historical biases into future AI tools. The concept of the ‘bias loop’ resonated with Ying-Chieh’s interest in gender equality and made her concerned for the uses and developments of AI which privileging some groups at the expense of others, especially where this repeats itself and causes inescapable cycles of injustice. 

Can you describe the process for creating this work?

Ying-Chieh started from developing some initial sketches and engaging in discussions with Jane, the programme coordinator, about her work. As you can see below, ‘Whos’ Creating the Kawaii Girl’ has evolved significantly from its initial sketch but ‘Can Your Data Be Seen?’ has remained quite similar to Ying-Chieh’s original design. 

The initial sketches of ‘Can Your Data Be Seen?’ (left) and ‘Who’s Creating the Kawaii Girl?’

Ying-Chieh also engaged in some activities during classes which helped her to learn more about AI and its ethical implications. One of these games, ‘You Say, I Draw’ involved one student describing an image and the other student drawing the image purely relying on their partner’s description without knowing what they were drawing.

This game highlighted the role that data providers and prompters play in the development of AI and challenged Ying-Chieh to think more carefully about how data was being used to train content generation tools. During the game, she realised that the personality, background, and experiences of the prompter really influenced what the resulting image looked like. In the same way, the type of data and the developers creating AI tools can really influence the final outputs and results of a system. 

An image of the results from the ‘You Say, I Draw’ activity

Better Images of AI aims to counteract common stereotypes and misconceptions about AI. How did you incorporate this goal into your artwork? 

Ying-Chieh’s aim was to explore and address biases present in AI models in order to contribute to the Better Images of AI mission so that the future development of AI can be more diverse and inclusive. She hopes that her illustrations will make it easier for the public to understand issues about biases in AI which are often inaccessible or shielded from wider comprehension.

Her images draw more attention to how AI’s training data is bias and how AI is being used to reinforce gender stereotypes about women. From this, Ying-Chieh hopes that further action can be taken to improve data collection and processing methods as well as more laws and rules about limits to image generation where it exploits or harms individuals. 

What have been the biggest challenges of creating a ‘better image of AI’? Did you encounter any challenges in trying to represent AI in a more nuanced and realistic way? 

Ying-Chieh spoke about her challenges in trying to strike the right balance between designing images that could be widely used and recognised by audiences as related to AI but also not falling into any common tropes that misrepresented AI (like robots, descending code, the colour blue). She also found it difficult to not make images too metaphorical to the extent that they may be misinterpreted by audiences.

Based on our criteria for selecting images, we were pleased to accept, ‘Who’s Creating the Kawaii Girl?’, but had the difficult decision to not upload ‘Can Your Data Be Seen’ based on the fact that it didn’t communicate and conceptualise AI enough. What do you think of this feedback and was it something that you considered in the process? 


Ying-Chieh shared that she had been continuous that her images would not be easily recognisable as communicating ideas about AI throughout the design process. She made some efforts to counteract this, for example, on ‘Can Your Data Be Seen’ she made the figures all identical to represent data points and the lighter coloured lines on the faces and bodies of the figures represent the technical elements behind AI image recognition technology.

How has working on this project influenced your own views on AI and its impact? 

Before starting this project, Ying-Chieh said that her opinion towards AI had been quite positive. She was largely influenced by things that she had seen and read in the news about how AI was going to benefit society. However, from her research on Facebook, she has become increasingly aware that this is not entirely true. There are many dangerous ways that AI can be used which are already lurking in the shadows of our daily lives.

 What have you learned through this process that you would like to share with other artists or the public?

The biggest takeaway from this project for Ying-Chieh is how camera angles, zooming, or object positioning can strongly influence the message that an image conveys. For example, in the initial sketches of ‘Can Your Data Be Seen’, Ying-Chieh explored how she could best capture the relationship of power through different depths of perspective.  

Various early sketches of ‘Can Your Data Be Seen’ from different depths of perspective

Furthermore, when exploring ideas about how to reflect the oppressive nature of AI, Ying-Chieh enlarged the shadow’s presence in the frame for ‘Who’s Creating the Kawaii Girl’. By doing this, the shadow reinforces the strong power that elite groups have over the creation of content about marginalised groups which is often hidden and kept secret from wider knowledge. 

Ying-Chieh’s exploration of how the photographer’s angle can reflect different positions of power and vulnerability

Ying-Chieh Lee (she/her) is a visual creator, illustrator, and comic artist from Taiwan. Her work often focuses on women-related themes and realistic, dark-style comics.