Weird, Uninteresting Bodies: What role does AI have in erasing certain bodies from the world?

AI image generation tools are often positioned as a way that they can imagine anyhing however the bodies that are represented are frequently narrow, standardised and perpetuating normative yet weird views of the world. Drawing on research around computer vision, AI and motion capture, this talk will take you through some research about attempting to represent disabled bodies within AI and the pitfalls that occur around that. It looks at assumptions within datasets and how these can end up within media production pipelines.

About the speaker:

Hazel is a researcher and immersive games designer based in London, UK. Having completed a PhD in co-designing sex and relationship education programmes with sexual health stakeholders around the city, their work looks at how design can be explored in playful, embodied and deeply collaborative ways.They are currently a Research Fellow at CoSTAR National Lab – focusing on inclusive design for new creative and immersive technologies. They are also a games designer, having worked on escape room projects such as Lily of Lumley and Escape to the Future for the IFRC. Their RPG work has been featured in Polygon’s Best RPGs we played in 2023.