“Human Trials” by Rashed Haq is a conceptual photography project that investigates how artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems shape, distort and categorise human identity. In this series, the artist retrains AI on a set of his own studio portraits — originally created using light painting — to generate portraits of people who do not exist, visualising how incomplete, biased or manipulated data can produce distorted representations of human subjects.

Haq’s work reflects on the often-invisible ways algorithms assign and interpret information about gender, age, ethnicity, profession and behaviour, whether through personalised recommendations or automated decision-making in hiring, loans or risk assessments, making abstract technological processes visually tangible. By foregrounding these AI-generated faces — simultaneously familiar and unreal — Human Trials invites viewers to question the assumptions embedded in computational systems and to consider how data, bias and automation influence our perception of identity and reality in the digital age.