Alternate Realities Summit — Sheffield DocFest

Workshop held with the AI + Documentary Working Group, the joint initiative between the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab and WITNESS, the human rights media organisation.

The group has been working since 2018 on the intersections between artificial intelligence and non-fiction, through research, publications, speaker series and advocacy that includes submissions to the United Nations. It brings together technologists, documentarians, artists, policy makers and human rights advocates to examine how AI is changing documentary practice, how it affects creative integrity and the spread of misinformation, and how a documentarian can work with these tools while covering the industry that produces them.

Artefacto’s session concentrated on that last point, which is where the uncomfortable part of the question sits. Using a technology and keeping the distance needed to report on it calls for concrete decisions about what gets generated, what is declared to the viewer and what material is better left untouched.

The group has opened its monthly meetings to a wider informal membership and maintains an open resource base of readings, films, projects and tools.

Workshop on artificial intelligence tools applied to creativity, given in Lima as part of MUTA, the International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation.

MUTA works specifically with found footage, re-editing and the reuse of other people’s material, a terrain where machine learning tools fit almost naturally. Recognising, classifying and retrieving images inside a large archive is exactly the kind of task these systems handle well, and audiovisual appropriation has been solving it by hand for decades.

The workshop was set up as a practical introduction for creators, across three sessions in July 2020, in the middle of cultural activity adapting to remote work.

It belongs to the training strand Artefacto and Gusano Films develop in Latin America, which has passed through the Cinemateca de Bogotá, DOCSDF in Mexico and festivals in the region interested in the crossing between archive, technology and documentary creation.

As part of Festival Gabo (Bogotá), Artefacto took part with two activities: a workshop on the use of artificial intelligence in audiovisual production and an Opendocs programme conversation with Jorge Carrión, reviewing four of the project’s short films and the role of new technologies in documentary.