Kaleidoscope Gallery: Exploring Ethics and Generative AI Through Art

2025-05-20

AI Summary

This study investigates how generative AI—particularly text-to-image (T2I) models—can visualize ethical theories and stimulate moral imagination. To address this, we conducted expert interviews to identify five core ethical frameworks, systematically prompting T2I models to generate corresponding visual representations and curating them into a “kaleidoscopic gallery.” Through qualitative analysis, thematic coding, and expert co-evaluation, we distilled eight empirically grounded, visually representable ethical themes. We introduce “visual ethics” as a novel artistic-practice paradigm—the first systematic effort to translate abstract ethical theories into imagery. Our findings reveal intricate interdependencies among moral imagination, sociocultural context, and model-induced biases. Beyond demonstrating the feasibility of ethical visualization, this work establishes a critical lens for interrogating the socio-technical dimensions of T2I systems, offering a transdisciplinary methodological foundation for AI ethics research. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Artificial General Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Machine Learning: Ethics, Bias, and Fairness

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems

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.

Problem

• Visualizing ethics through Generative AI models
• Exploring moral imagination using art and kaleidoscope metaphor
• Examining ethical theories as foundational knowledge for GenAI

Innovation

• Visualizing ethics via text-to-image GenAI models
• Using art as critical inquiry for ethics
• Transforming ethical theories into AI-generated images