Heibara Ai is the name of a fictional character filled with meaning and personality by an anonymous artist collective. The art project aims to research generative AI and translate those learnings into artworks and educational material.

On this blog, you will find an array of learning resources to utilise and understand generative AI. The idea is to make AI accessible and focus on locally run algorithms in opposition to paid online services. We believe that the challenges that AI poses can only be dealt with by an educated public and that the best way to get an understanding of the technology is by utilising it in ethical ways. This is what we aim to promote through this blog.

The name Heibara Ai is derived from the character Haibara Ai from the Detective Conan manga and anime written by Gosho Aoyama. As much as the character Haibara Ai, Heibara Ai is a character hiding in plain sight. This theme is incorporated in many of the works published under the pseudonym, with characters veiled in linen with hidden faces. This is both a conceptual link to the origin of the pseudonym as it is a conversation with the Stable Diffusion models that we are using for our generations. Those Stable Diffusion models often struggle with generating characters with hidden faces, which relates to their underlying data sets.

With this and many more layers that create AI systems, we deal in our artworks, trying to find ways to ethically and critically work with technologies of the present.