by Saara Niemeläinen
This work is about finding the mind of the machine, discovering how artifical intelligence thinks, speaks and sees. So I’ve curated the scripts, the narration, the visuals and even the names for short videos, all made by using various generative tools available online. Only thing made by human hands is the very first sentence in the script. These brief prompts are inspired by real relationship problems, which have been caused by, in some part, the current COVID19 situation in order to get one machine’s reaction to a very topical human issue.
As the text generator writes its story, the generated “script” passes through a text-to-speech and a text-to-image generator, giving the AI’s story a narrator and visuals. Even the name of the piece is AI’s handiwork. With these pieces combined into a complete short video, we are given the illusion of a machine reading us its strange, uncanny stories, accompanied by its strange, uncanny illustrations.
AI’s thoughts are often shocking and unorthodox, but sometimes a glimmer of an universal truth can be seen. So, can you perceive the mind behind the machine?
It is almost at the point where one or both of them may.
The same is true with measles or mumps.
A man doesn’t want to feel.
My encounter with my friend.
He will beat us.
Tools used:
Scripts: Talk to Transformer https://talktotransformer.com/
Visuals: RunwayML Generative Engine https://experiments.runwayml.com/generative_engine/
Narrations: Watson Text to Speech https://text-to-speech-demo.ng.bluemix.net/