Journey of Creation
The journey in my selfie creation was a unique experience that really challenged my thought process and
perspective when it comes to identity. The new generation of technology that we have entered is very
fresh and exciting, though it is also important to not get too carried away in its power that it can hold over
our own autonomy. I solely used the program Artbreeder for my digital selfie creation, as it was relatively
simple to grasp the concept of, though results would vary in consistency and accuracy. The biggest
challenge I was faced with, were the physical descriptions of my appearance. I have never had to
describe myself in such detail, which made it difficult to articulate myself in such a way. I overcame this
challenge by simply having to accept the fact that no outcome that was spit out, would ever truly
represent me or my identity. I did not save the original prompt I used for my final image, though I did my
best to recreate it whilst exploring some of the elements that I struggled with. You simply can not reduce
your identity to a prompt box.
Self-Representation and Identity
There are certain aspects that align with my physical-world identity, though I would say that most do
not. The beauty of human existence lies in the uniqueness of every individual on this planet. No one is
truly identical, and no one is perfect. The airbrush look of AI currently portrays humans in an uncanny
way. Social media as a whole has caused many problems in relation to self esteem, with many feeling the
need to display their best and upmost self. This creates a sort of identity performance, and it seems like
artificial intelligence takes after this, making people look as perfect as possible. Though many platforms
started off as a casual corner of the internet where many would post mundane pictures to share a glimpse
into everyday life, this soon changed, especially after celebrities got involved in having an online
presence. The commodification of oneself is a concept that has transcended famous people posting brand
deals, as now we have regular people treating their online persona solely as a way to garner attention, or even
money, thus came the birth of the social media influencer. The lines become blurred between what is real
and what is not in the digital world.
Ethical and Cultural Dimensions
Artifical intelligence ‘learns’ from human datasets, not to say that it is a perfect translation of
human norms and values, but in many ways it is. One glaring example of this is AI viewing
whiteness as the ‘default’ character. In my experimenting, I would type in various broad prompts,
along the lines of; ‘man with ___.’ Every result was of a white man. For my own selfie, I likely did
not have to add ‘white’ to my description, as it is reasonable to believe that it would default to that
anyway. With AI, there are so many harmful portrayals of race that perpetuate many real-world
stereotypes, and I’m sure many struggled in their selfie creation with this aspect taken into
account. Collective narratives are central to the human condition (Chubb & Cowling, 2022), it
becomes our responsibility to reconstruct what the collective narrative is.
Gender is another ethical consideration with artificial intelligence, as it perpetuates hegemonic
views of gender roles in society. This became quite clear as typing in doctor, I got a white male.
But then typing in nurse, I got a white woman. This exact same thing happened with ‘Professor’
being portrayed as a white man and ‘Teacher’ being portrayed as a white woman. These are very
prevalent stereotypes still today in our society, so with the rampant use of technologies that
have adopted said stereotypes, is immensely harmful. However, this does open the floor to modes
of resistance, which reminds me of the #ILookLikeAnEngineer movement, that aimed to
counteract gender stereotypes through an identity hashtag movement (Liu et al., 2017). It is quite
possible that similar movements may take place with the growing presence of AI.
Figure 4 (Artbreeder, 2026)
Transliteracy Reflection
This diverse way of sharing our reflections added a very interesting component to this process. The blog
post format as a medium can affect the message portrayal in many ways. For one, it can feel like less of a
formal academic setting. It makes it feel like a true reflection of my experiences, making my response
seem less calculated, and perhaps more honest. Though I would say that the formatting added an extra
challenge to the assignment. Despite that, I believe that these alternate modes of communication are
immensely important in expanding our transliteracy skills.
References
Artbreeder (2026) https://www.artbreeder.com/
Chubb, J., Reed, D. & Cowling, P.(2022). Expert views about missing AI narratives:
is there an AI story crisis?. AI & Soc. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1007/s00146-022-01548-2
Holmes, Leonard. (2004). Beyond Learnerism: Learning, Practices, Emergent Identity.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/dentity-practice-model-of-performance_fig1_374388665
Liu, F., Ford, D., Parnin, C., & Dabbish, L. (2017). Selfies as social movements.
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(CSCW), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134707
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