Kaleidoscope Gallery: Exploring Ethics and Generative AI Through Art

TL;DR

This paper uses art and visualizations generated by text-to-image AI to explore and critically examine ethical theories, revealing how morality and societal values influence AI models and their interpretations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel visual ethics approach by transforming ethical theories into images, fostering critical inquiry into GenAI models through art and expert evaluation.

Findings

Eight themes highlight societal and moral influences on ethics

Visualizations reveal learned associations in ethical theories

Expert evaluation validates the interpretive framework

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.