Open source projects have long been THE critical dependencies in our digital infrastructure, as xkcd illustrated. This showcase will softly trace three of the soft dependencies in the process of heuristic filtering web-scraped data for pre-training large models. How did the five categories for classifying NSFW images, that later expanded to NSFTM ( Not-Safe-For-Training-Model), come into being? Where does the blocklist every dataset uses for blocking bad content come from?
Zooming out, do dependencies have to be so arbitrary? Can we imagine a softer, decentralized interdependency? In this quick sharing, we will also discuss the possibilities of the trans*feminist imaginary of dependency.
jiawen uffline's artworks are on view in the exhibition AMRO26: Becoming Unreadable at SPLACE, and in Decay and Desire at bb15.
