Amelia Winger-Bearskin on why AI needs artists as a guiding force

Amelia Winger-Bearskin in an artist, technologist and researcher who specializes in working in and with artificial intelligence. She lives in Jacksonville, FL, where she is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida.Her work, though incredibly varied, always focuses on finding ways to use AI to benefit communities and the environment.  In 2017 she founded a nonprofit, IDEA New Rochelle, that created a VR/AR Citizen toolkit to engage the community as co-designers of their future city. The project, in partnership with the New Rochelle mayor’s office, won a highly competitive $1 million Bloomberg Mayors Challenge grant.   Amelia is Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan, part of the Haudenosaunee Confederation, and through much of her work she interrogates the supposed neutrality of technology and AI and strives to imbue new technology with the values of her Native culture. In 2019 she created Wampum.Codes, which is both an ethical framework for software development based on Indigenous values of co-creation and an award-winning podcast of the same name. In the podcast, Amelia interviews Indigenous artists and technologists about how they manifest their Native cultures’ values in their work. In this interview with Pier Carlo Talenti, Amelia draws a line between her youthful activities — providing music for her mother’s storytelling sessions and experimenting with her engineer father’s discarded prototypes — and her current mission to transform us all from mere consumers of technology to engaged participants creating a better world with new tools.https://www.studioamelia.com/Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.