Good afternoon everyone,

How's your Friday been so far? I hope that it's good and that you have a nice treat planned for tonight or tomorrow. Here's a Fem Fri about women who are doing cool and good things with artificial intelligence. Lots to think about and listen to here.

Firstly, this interview with Cynthia Dwork is what I want from interviews with scientists. It's really wide-ranging while also stepping through a specific example as an illustration of why her work – on algorithmic fairness – matters, and also how it works. I like how she talks about the value of just doing the work, seen in the pullquote below. You'll enjoy the whole thing though:

I’d started playing the piano at the age of about six, and I dutifully did my half-hour of practice a day. I was fine. But one time — I guess freshman year of high school — I passed by the auditorium and I heard somebody playing a Beethoven sonata. He was a sophomore, and I realized that you didn’t have to be on the concert-giving scale to play much, much better than I was playing. I actually started practicing about four hours a day after that. But it had not occurred to me that anything like this was possible until I saw that someone who was just another student could do it.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/making-algorithms-fair-an-interview-with-cynthia-dwork-20161123/

Staying with music, Holly Herndon's collaborator for her latest album is an AI called Spawn. The album is a really good listen, and they got their training sets in such an interesting way:

“We had three main approaches,” says Herndon, “We started training it on my voice and Mat’s voice, and some little Foley sounds around the house. Then we opened up that training to our [vocal] ensemble. And then we opened it up again with the public.” The public event, called Deep Belief, held in 2018, incorporated an interactive theatre performance where Herndon’s ensemble led the public through the creation of training sets. This involved reciting text, emoting and producing other sounds together. These were recorded and turned into more training data for the AI to understand and interpret.

https://www.musictech.net/features/holly-herndon-proto/

Now you can listen to a track where Spawn was the creative lead – here is Godmother. Lots of comments finding the video disturbing, and I can't honestly disagree with them, so maybe one to listen to with YouTube hidden under other, more nice and normal, tabs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc9OjL6Mjqo

Have a lovely day,

Alex.

NB if you can think of a better title for today's newsletter do let me know. I couldn't think of anything clever so went very literal. Do you have a favourite AI pun? Or joke about blockchain? All are welcome.