Last Friday was the opening of the CoCreated: The artist in the age of intelligent machines show at Burlington City Arts. I was sad to miss the opening due to covid.. it sounds like it was a great party.. My friend Chris T has been workign on the show for over a year. I got a call from 7Days to be interviewed abotut he show. I figurted I’d better hurry and see it first… so Diane and I wen down aroudn noon to see it.It was really a wonderful collection of work.. My deep congrats to Chris and our friends Jenn K, Lapo, Donna, Jane ,. Mauro and all the other artists and techs. The show has many facets.. The show was built around the concept of generative AI .. that is AI that can create new things.. new images, movies, sounds. physical shapes. It explores the transition we’re now experiencing where Artificial intelligence no longer just analyzes.. but it creates.. .. this was once just something humans could do.. what does that mean to art .. or any other form of creative enterprise.. going forward ? is it a threat ? is it a tool ? The show didn’t try to answer those questions. .just form them in the viewers mind.
There were so many interesting pieces.. My friend Jenn did a generative peice that was trained on images of diseased plant leaves. My freidn Lapo mad aa a really fin peice that used AI to do motion captire of peoples hand gestrues to manipulate a beautiful abstract form.. (I had fun workig on the cocept with Lapo). THere were severla cool genrative movie peices .. one by my good freidn Maru from the MIT-IBM lab tha will evolve throught he shows 3 mont run. Casey Reas, the creater of processing had a anotuerh evolving movie peice that will also evolve during the length of the show. How cool is that .. I’ve never been to an art show that changes and evolves over the course of it s run.
THere were some other thoguthp provinking peices.. Joshow Rohere had trained a chatbot based ont he GPT3 transformer model using the soceial media of another mans girlfreind wh’d died. The peice was called Jessica.. and you could intereact with it by typing.. It certainly felt liek a ‘personality’.. event though it was just responding with statistically likely responses… its not intelligent.. it’s a sophisticated illusion. but if it gives soemone comfort.. I suppose thats a good thing.. I liked the way the show worked to help peopl e understand how generative AI worked. I particually like the simple explaination work that my freind aJanew had oen for the show .. bth as a poster.. and as an interesting artistic visualization of the latent space of a generative machine. and what that means to explanabiliuty in decision systems.
it’s so (!) timely a discussion .. I was recently appointed to the Vermont state AI commission. It’s an oversight group that will help the state make informed choices about any sort of automated decisions systems used by government agencies. As part of that I’ve been speaking to so many vermonters about AI.. Most of the the discussions center on the fears of folks have on the way AI can harm us.. many of these concerns are real.. soem are speculative, but I rarely hear someone comment on the power AI has to improve our lives.. It’s clear to me that we need to have more nuanced discussions about about what AI can and cant do and what it.. should and shouldn’t do
I think events like this show can help build interest and understandign of AI.. and can get people talking in helpful ways.
Please go check out the show CoCreated: The artist in the age of intelligent machines at Burlington City Arts. It running through May. I’d really like to hear what you think !
nite all, nite sam
-me