MARIA MAVROPOULOU

In Their own image, in the image of God, They created Them

The era of Artificial intelligence is usually imagined as the time when humanoid robots will interact with us in our daily lives. Failing to realize that we have been interacting with AI for some time now already led me to wonder how to visualize software rather than through the hardware it manifests itself.  If AI is the spirit what can be its body?

Work has always been a part of human life to be regulated by religion, ideology, and governors. One’s job defined the person’s place in society, perceived identity, and self-esteem. In this series of works, I decided to focus on industrial settings as I find it important to reflect especially on this creative, productive and even innovative aspect of AI that now is able to operate a production line with the minimum help of human workers.

Throughout human history, creativity was considered to be a divine power. Gods were believed to be the ones that created the world and humankind. In ancient Greece, inspiration was granted to mortals by the Muses, and thus artists were considered vessels through which higher truths could be translated into an art form accessible to humans. Today AI doesn’t need any other inspiration than its training set of billions of images created by the painstaking effort of humans.

To create those structures that I call Technototems I insert a text prompt to a text-to-image generating AI using a prompt like, for example, " a complex and sophisticated structure of pipes, valves, manometers, used in oil refineries", then I select an image I like and ask the program to create many variations of it. I use the images produced by the AI as tiles. To create the final result I mirror half of the constructed image. The final image is composed inside our brain, in the fusiform gyrus area, which is dedicated to face recognition and tricks us to see faces in everyday objects, an illusion that is called face pareidolia. Interestingly enough, just as the first thing that human babies can recognize is their parent’s face, the first field of machine vision to evolve was face recognition. These structures are transformed into beings through this biological process vital for our survival.

Since AI spreads across productive and creative industries and work positions are eliminated, are we condemned or freed? Are we giving up too much of ourselves in exchange for the hard work it offers to do for us?  What happens inside AI's opaque, complex, mathematical minds? What are their ethics? Who are these entities? Are they restless slaves we exploit or the masters we obey?

In the exhibition space, there is also a sound installation. 4 speakers in low volume play a sound like the one below. The sound is a synthetic female voice whispering a part of the code used to create the images displayed. The sound is a synthetic female voice whispering a part of the code used to create the images displayed. Code has been a language that people invented to “talk” to and program machines, while synthetic voices are a way for machines and programs (mainly apps like for example navigation) to speak to humans. The effect of the sound piece is eerie, it sounds familiar as a human voice but uncanny as well. Moreover, the content of the text that is read out is a language not meant for people to understand (unless one is a coder) since it is code. The overall feeling is of an indistinguishable psalm, resembling religious hymns.