2023, Video with Sound, Animation, 5:17 min, Chat history from 6.02.2023
What ChatGPT has to say about the “Uncanny Valley”.
What or who is ChatGPT? I asked “him” this question, to which “he” replied the following:
“I am an artificial intelligence model trained by OpenAI. My answers are based on the information I recorded during my training process. During this training, I was fed an enormous amount of text from a variety of sources, including books, journal articles, news reports and scientific studies. In this way I was able to develop a broad understanding of many different topics and areas of expertise(…). However, it is important to note that I am not able to gather my own experience and that my answers may not always be complete or 100% accurate. My answers should always be used as a source of information and not as definitive expert advice.”
2023, video with sound, 5:22 min, interaktive survey
In this work, we are confronted with an old photo that has been “brought to life” with the help of artificial intelligence. Does the girl seem authentic? Do we feel closer to her? What becomes of faulty memory when it gives way to artificial liveliness? Isn’t this illusion more likely to help us forget the last remnants of our memory of the real person? And would “Paula” have liked what we do with her memory?
Thanks to artificial intelligence, it is already possible today to create a perfect, seemingly “living” digital self, as offered by companies such as Storyfile and Eternos.life. We leave countless traces on the internet in the form of search queries, purchases, contributions from our lives – photos, videos, comments – and much more. Will this turn us into transparent marionettes that ghost around the web forever? Who is pulling the strings in the background? Will we still be able to tell the difference between living and dead, human and artificial? And further: if the loss of a person is compensated for by a digital twin – what meaning will farewell, grief and pain still have?
“Paula’s” real portrait photo can be found in the work Below the Surface (Book Object).
Music: AI-generated
Can you imagine that the memory of you exists forever on the net as a living digital twin?
Would you like to resurrect a deceased loved one as a digital copy?
Survey:
Would you consider bringing a photo of a deceased loved one to “life” using an AI application? Yes? / No?
Conditio Humana II, 2023, video with sound, 4:48 min
Based on the work Conditio Humana I, the question of what the conditio humana is is continued here. If we consider the highest art form of human movement – dance – it is a combination of absolute body control, elegance and emotionality. This is contrasted here with a “dance” by the humanoid robot HRP-4C, as it was presented to the world public in 2010.
More than one third of the world‘s population is part of the social networking community. Therefore these platforms play an increasing role as economic environments in the online world; and the attention of the user becomes a precious, but scarce resource. But the business model of gratuitious access to these communities hides a significant danger: surveillance and behavior modification by private enterprise companies, who develop powerful tools for manipulation. This new technology is called Attention Engineering. It is composed of interface design, gamification and deep learning, and it utilises psychological aspects of human behavior.
The conditio humana refers to the conditions or circumstances of being human in general, usually in contrast to animals. What makes a person human? Is it language? Is it the imagination? What is the conditio humana in relation to artificial intelligence? In a monologue, I let a (fictitious) AI discuss this here.
The starting point for this work was a report on a new milestone in the development of artificial intelligence: In 2019, researchers succeeded for the first time in developing an AI that won a poker game against five real professional players. All in all, this requires special skills that catapult artificial intelligence to the next level of evolution.
Is an AI the better human in the end?
Dancer: Dominic Feistmantl
Premiere: Façade projection in Buenos Aires / Argentina on December 17 2022
The term homunculus (Latin for “little man”) refers to an artificially created human being – and stands for mankind’s dream of being able to construct a being according to its own imagination and with the help of the latest technology. In literature, this idea has already been processed in many ways, for example in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Today, we are closer to this dream than ever before, but in the age of deep learning, it is neither alchemists nor scientists, but programmers who teach artificial intelligence to generate human-like faces independently and deceptively realistically. Ingenious, scary or dangerous?