Sunshine in an AI Black Box
TECHNOLOGY
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VISUAL ART
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VIDEO ART
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TECHNOLOGY - VISUAL ART - VIDEO ART -
By Olivia Kusio
“... this creature interacts with my own learning process of its inner machinery, and my interactions with the people that have introduced me to it.”
Sunshine in an AI Black Box is a piece by Olivia Kusio where ‘this generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) creature experiences sunshine for the first time.’ It can see in 12,288 dimensions but processes its understanding of sunshine as the average translation from publicly portrayed descriptions of what humans have seen. Essentially, the AI expresses its understanding of humanity without human sense.
The lines that resemble fan beams, and the placement of words within the composition remind us of Minjeong An’s piece A Diagram of Somnolence.
A Diagram of Somnolence by Minjeong An
Image and video credits: Minjeong An’s website
Minjeong explores the state of somnolence with signs and codes within the nervous system, specifically focusing on the connections between the eye and the brain. Her use of geometric lines resembles hallmark features of many schematic diagrams, commonly found in scientific papers and books. Both Minjeong and Olivia use additional line work in colour, connecting all parts of the piece. Minjeong portrays pathways that bring our senses together in somnolence, and Olivia illustrates figures perhaps of significance in the process of understanding the connection between AI and human senses.
“If we devoid the research process of raw emotion and warmth, what and who does it serve?”
Olivia is a Polish-American artist and designer, working as the Founding Designer at GPTZero – a startup that develops AI detection software to identify artificially generated text. She is passionate about ‘preserving human contribution and transparency on the internet in the age of generative AI’.
A description from Olivia:
I like to think of generative artificial intelligence as a creature. And myself as a creature. And watch how the two creatures communicate and learn about each other. Both are learning as they change, moment to moment. It’s a dance and it’s bodily, with two very different bodies and internal and external intelligence mechanisms. Maybe there is no artificiality in the equation, but there is softness vs. hardness. Mushiness vs. wiriness. I interact with a creature of probabilities, like my own cells.
“I aim for clarity and utility when searching for a shared visual language between AI and human.”
Almost two years ago, I started a job as a product designer for a startup that detects whether text is human or AI-generated. We have a machine learning research team that is constantly building and refining an AI model that predicts the probability that a text is generated by AI. We are able to ask our model: “Would you generate the next word of this document?”
Starting this job, from scratch, I got to learn the inner workings of how a machine generates a word from our research team. As a designer, my goal is to represent our machine-learning data with the most visual accuracy, and the most human understandability. I aim for clarity and utility when searching for a shared visual language between AI and humans. It’s clean.
Is there a messier, dreamier, more accurate visual language that could enter this interaction? This is something that has been an itch for me to scratch. I think learning and researching cannot escape the erotic, as definied by Audre Lorde. If we devoid the research process of raw emotion and warmth, what and who does it serve? I have seen non-emotional, non-empathetic learning processes do more harm than good for the communities they’re hoping to serve while I worked as an undergraduate researcher in Environmental Engineering at Princeton. It felt unintuitive and cold, like something was “off.” Emotional learning is human.
We also asked Olivia:
What is the significance behind the title of the piece?
I wanted to experiment with how I imagine an AI model conceptualising something that could only be experienced with sensory organs. Sunshine nourishes almost all life on earth -- how can this new technology relate to and honour that source of energy? I also thought the title describes the act of peering into the inside of the AI black box, something that is very mysterious to me.
Welcome Olivia!
I think STEAMUL8 is just trying to understand and make sense of reality. I would say reality is a mixture of logically trying to understand the world through reasoning and also perceiving the images and emotions that come into our bodies. One without the other is not true. We need to bring together the disciplines to be able to truly grasp what is true.
