Love Corpora
Love Corpora will be a collection of datasources featuring texts that orient towards life and liberation; created with community input and contributor consent; metadata will provide full transparency about contents, licensing terms, and collection methodologies.
What inspired Love Corpora?
Love Corpora was inspired by a longing to collaborate more with people interested in working with AI, storytelling, and their own cultural archives. It was also inspired by the crisis of imagination that literally underlies the machine learning models that big tech companies spend millions of dollars to make without the input or consent of the people they might be harming along the way.
Who benefits from Love Corpora?
Artists, storytellers, educators, writers, and other curious humans will enjoy:
- Accessible documentation, tools, and methodologies that can serve anyone with a desire to work with “small data” and their own cultural archives.
- A respectful process for doing this work that can be replicated or adapted to meet the particular needs of diverse communities.
How do we create a respectful Love Corpora?
The dream is to explore the possibilities of creating new knowledge–relationships using AI, with and by a plurality of voices. This will be a very slow process, with working groups and careful deliberation over the decisions we make along the way.
This is not an attempt to create a monolithic collection. We do not wish to appropriate texts from bodies of cultures. Nor do we wish to extract knowledge that should be protected from machine learning algorithms or further exploitation. The integrity of this project is dependent on the level of humility, responsibility, and consent taken to see it through.
Much care will be given to the processes of working in open collaborations that are inclusive, transparent and accountable to the bodies of knowledge and people we are in community with or wish to serve.
Our goal is to be better facilitators. There maybe many corpora, there maybe none. In the end, we may decide that opting out of a corpora is the greatest act of love.
What would you love to see in Love Corpora?
We’re compiling a wish list of data sources and welcome your recommendations. Note: none of these sources will be used without the explicit consent of the authors. Archives will be respected.
Acknowledgements
Building trust with and uplifting others already doing this important work is foundational. Deep respect and admiration for Dreaming Beyond AI, Indigenous AI, AI x Design, Computational Mama, Yasmin Morgan, Xin Xin, Minne Atairu, House of Monstress Intelligenzia, Allison Parrish, Stephanie Dinkins, Mimi Onuoha, Katy Gero to name a few.
Who is tending this garden?
Sarah Ciston is a self-described poet-programmer who loves building community through critical-creative code and bringing Intersectional approaches to AI. They hold a PhD in Media Arts and Practice from USC and were an Artistic Research Resident at AI Anarchies in Berlin.
Emily Martinez is a new media artist, 1st generation immigrant/refugee (Cuba > Miami), and a self-taught coder who believes in the tactical misuse of technology. She started Unsupervised Pleasures as part of her ML5.js Fellowship project to document some of her research and experiments with LLMs.