Kaleidoscope Gallery: Exploring Ethics and Generative AI Through Art
It addresses the need for critical inquiry into generative AI as socio-technical systems, though it is incremental in expanding the field of Visual Ethics.
This paper tackled the problem of visualizing ethical theories using generative AI models, specifically text-to-image models, to create art that reveals eight themes linking morality, society, and learned associations to ethics.
Ethical theories and Generative AI (GenAI) models are dynamic concepts subject to continuous evolution. This paper investigates the visualization of ethics through a subset of GenAI models. We expand on the emerging field of Visual Ethics, using art as a form of critical inquiry and the metaphor of a kaleidoscope to invoke moral imagination. Through formative interviews with 10 ethics experts, we first establish a foundation of ethical theories. Our analysis reveals five families of ethical theories, which we then transform into images using the text-to-image (T2I) GenAI model. The resulting imagery, curated as Kaleidoscope Gallery and evaluated by the same experts, revealed eight themes that highlight how morality, society, and learned associations are central to ethical theories. We discuss implications for critically examining T2I models and present cautions and considerations. This work contributes to examining ethical theories as foundational knowledge that interrogates GenAI models as socio-technical systems.