Kaleidoscope Gallery: Exploring Ethics and Generative AI Through Art
Alayt Issak, Uttkarsh Narayan, Ramya Srinivasan, Erica Kleinman, Casper Harteveld
TL;DR
This paper advances Visual Ethics by visualizing ethical theories through GenAI using a kaleidoscope metaphor. It combines formative expert interviews with a 5-family taxonomy of ethical theories, generates images via a T2I model to form the Kaleidoscope Gallery, and conducts expert evaluation to reveal how morality, society, and learned associations shape model representations. The findings highlight biases, cultural skew, and the social-technical implications of deploying GenAI imagery for ethics discourse. The work emphasizes the need for social value alignment, transparency, and participatory design as GenAI tools become integrated into education, culture, and policy.
Abstract
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.