“The Man” - VOLUME 1

“The Man” a reference to the proverbial “Man” in power, is an exploration of the inherent bias in artificial intelligence algorithms. These Time Magazine covers do not exist. They are the result of training general adversarial networks for months on the full set of Time Magazine covers, and then subsets of grouped decades. The resulting models can generate extremely realistic non existent Time Magazine covers in the style of the relevant decade. While the model has produced tens of thousands of covers, every one of them is a white man, usually a balding white man in a suit and tie, in other words “The Man”.

While a fair number of Time covers feature non white male subjects, once they are inserted into the black box of the general adversarial network, the features are deemed less “real” than what is present in the abundant number of white cover subjects and are dropped from the model that generates new covers. This is a perfect example of how a non racist AI can be inherently bias because of a history of suppression of women and POC in America.

Below is the first of “The Man” series. Each man has a name, based on the most popular baby name for the decade set the cover was generated from, and a quote created by training an additional artificial intelligence on a dataset full of quotes from each of the actual subjects who have appeared on the cover of Time Magazine from 1920-1999.

Volume 1 contains No #1-5, subsequent volumes will include new unique covers, one from each of the following decade groupings (‘20-’39, ‘40-’59, ‘60-’79, ‘80-’99, “Collapse”).