This week, I am exploring a phenomenon in AI known as overrepresentation, a concept vividly illustrated by the work of artists Brodbeck & de Barbuat. Through their series "A Parallel History," they redefine iconic moments in the history of photography, playing on our collective memory where the images, while familiar, often elude us regarding their origins. But what is overrepresentation in AI? Far from merely memorizing data, generative AIs, such as neural networks, learn and model the probability distribution of the data. This means they capture the statistical essence of the data rather than the data itself. Imagine, rather than storing each image, these models learn the visual "language" of these images to then create new works. The challenge of overrepresentation arises when certain data dominate the training set of these AIs. The result? A tendency to reproduce images that closely resemble these frequently represented data. This phenomenon can sometimes limit AI creations and raises important questions about creativity, diversity, and even plagiarism. To illustrate this topic, let's examine the captivating work of Brodbeck & de Barbuat in "A Parallel History." This duo of artists explores the interaction between our memory and modern creation tools, generating images through AI from textual data to recreate a fictional history of photography, illuminating the impact of technologies on our visual perception. Their project, consisting of photographs and videos, questions the reliability of our visual memories and how our memory "fills the gaps between what we see and what we think we recognize." The work of Brodbeck & de Barbuat encourages us to reflect on how these AI-generated images, while relying on real references, form a collective memory that is both familiar and strangely altered. In contemplating "A Parallel History," we are led to question what defines authenticity in the digital age. Is the accuracy of an image relative to its original necessary for it to hold value, or does the AI's interpretation enrich our artistic experience with a new dimension? Brodbeck & de Barbuat do not offer simple answers, but rather open a space for contemplation and debate.

- Dimitri Daniloff

© Brodbeck & de Barbuat