Inspiration from GOAT Octavia Butler

Some pre women & non-binary pep talk from Octavia Butler

Next week SudoRoom is all-in on Octavia Butler!

8/12 – Women & Non Binary Monday – Workshop on AI Open Source models with inspiration from the Goddess Monday
8/13 Octavia Butler Theme during hardware hack night! 8pm – ????

Some Words

Here’s a 2005 interview with Octavia on Democracy Now to get your creative juices flowing!

Some pre workshop pep inspiration from Octavia Butler, goddess and science fiction hero!

Using Technology Respectfully

In our conversations this week, we’ll be thinking about the role of technology, which is unavoidable, but at the same time, how do we guide ourselves to use technology such as artificial intelligence (especially artificial intelligence) in a way that enhances our experiences with Octavia Butler that doesn’t feel empty or cheap and a rip-off of her work?

This is an entire rabbit hole! We won’t be going too much over these topics in our meetup today due to time constraints, but this could be the basis of an entire separate meetup.

Advances in artificial intelligence raise new ethics concerns (PBS News Hour) / January 2023

From PBS “Advances in Artificial Intelligence” reporter Stephany Sy speaks of artists getting their work ripped off and going to sites such as haveibeentrained.com to see if their work was sucked up into models. Common discussions online also discuss the impact of cheating in schools and replacing artists.

Dustin Hosseini discusses how portrayals of black women follow minstrel stereotypes

How do we back the open-source AI horses that aren’t raving misogynists and anti-woke crusaders?

Being Proactive with Models – Is there a way women can proactively train models so for example more images of men that are appealing to heterosexual men surface, or the reality of code-switching for African Americans is present?

Seeing women as humans – Could we create a world where the generate ai models suck up stereotypes and data and women can be seen as human beings instead of solely wives and mothers or teachers of children?
- Can the female heterosexual gaze be activated?

How do we go forward as a society without too many regulations, but also protect writers such as Octavia Butler from getting their voices ripped off?

If other countries are going forward with models anyway, does it matter if we clamp down on laws? Will too much regulation just enable bad actors to flourish in places without regulation?

Why Now? Why SudoRoom?

Also it’s a nice moment to say that SudoRoom is unique! Being in Oakland and focused also on society and the arts, we’d like to think that we have a bit more heart in our hackerspace projects. We are pretty different, and the uniqueness of Octavia Butler inspires us.

I’m wondering if this might be our Octavia Butler year after she was such a muse during our Art Gallery walk at the SF Moma!

Our women and non-binary meetups focus on being hands-on and human. By having no remote meetup elements, we are able to focus on deep discussions and not get distracted by screens.