Tufts University Art Galleries
Grossman & Anderson Galleries at SMFA | Tufts campus
230 Fenway, Boston
[Video, Invideo AI (18.40min.)]
“Compelling, hilarious, and disturbing.”
–Jessica Kingdon, director of Ascension
“This video is a trip. The contrast between the aesthetic and culture of the AI engine, and of the farmworkers themselves is truly wild. And unsettling. I think it’s a powerful commentary on what the AI is, and the foundations of its engine: it takes any story and transforms it into the soft-focus, non-threatening imagery of American advertising.”
–Héctor Tobar, Guggenheim award winner and author of Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”
Can artificial intelligence ethically and accurately depict the lives of vulnerable populations? FieldworkAI is an experimental film that sets out to answer that question. In March of 2024, Paulina Sierra and Yxta Murray traveled to Fresno County and filmed interviews with undocumented Latino farmworkers, asking them about their exposures to pesticides, their families, their dreams, and their experiences with discrimination and harassment. Sierra and Murray then fed descriptions of three interviews to InvideoAI, an artificial intelligence text-to-video program that was one of the most sophisticated, available platforms at that time. InvideoAI generated three videos in response to Sierra and Murray’s prompts.
FieldworkAI simultaneously reveals the struggles of California farmworkers and how AI mangles the experiences of people of color and undocumented populations. By comparing the interviews with the AI interpretations of these people’s stories, we see how AI platforms that rely on image libraries such as Shutterstock and Storyblocks transform real people’s stories into anodyne, even racist and sexist, commercial products. The viewer is challenged to read AI’s reductive stories and come up with critiques of their own.
Showing of Fieldwork AI at the Collective Exhibition: Ulises: Assembly.
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Thanks to Rocío Madrigal, community outreach coordinator for the Central California Environmental Justice Network.