The artist writes: “Lights out manufacturing refers to a fully automated factory that requires no human presence on site. Similarly, the portraits in Lights Out are not real people—they are deep fakes created by artificial intelligence utilizing a neural network. This network was trained with a dataset of 50,000 pictures of factory workers sourced through Facebook. I empower the machine to visualize those it has replaced by employing these found identities to teach the algorithm to see, interpret, and render out its own assembly of 60,000 laborers—one worker for each factory shuttered since 2000.”

http://www.kaitlynjosmith.com/

Excerpt from Lights Out, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.