Studio Brief

The past decade has seen a rapid explosion in the development of generative artificial intelligence tools used to instantly produce powerful, polished images, coherent written text, and life-like audio. Collaborative Futures is a speculative film studio that will examine and critique the rapid adoption of these tools and other potential applications of AI in every day life. We will envision the potential impact of AI on different facets of life in the approaching years, such as health care, societal roles, and human creativity. 

Reflection In Water is a high tech interactive art installation which represents AI trying to mimic human emotion through a natural ocean scene. While the ambition is to have a detailed model which mapped various minutiae of facial expressions onto the waves and clouds to evoke the same emotions that the expression details equal in a human, what we accomplished was a model of an ocean scene which responds to some facial movements.

Precedents

SOPHYGREY | Nadja Verena Marcin

https://hyperallergic.com/863594/can-we-create-an-intersectional-ai/

background research? precedents?

story thinkings

comics? or on next slide?

plot diagram?

Early Ideas

1: "Some sort of rigged and controlled by a human model is interacted with, but then starts ‘glitching’ and doing preset animations instead of following the directions of the human."

2: "A beautified AI version of a human counterpart in a mirror slowly breaks free from its forced appearance, eventually being shattered into pieces for being ugly."

3: "Humans have created an AI that shows you a visual representation of the ‘perfect’ you. The AI starts out with what human biases think is perfect, ex. You as a white cis man. But the AI slowly begins to diverge from humanity, and create its own version of perfection, something beyond human comprehension."

Gift Version

Mall Version

Story Iterations

The AI lives in a mall. Every day, hundreds of people look at the large screen which shows the AI’s interpretation of their perfect self, and its recommendation of which products to buy to achieve that. Occasionally it sees a mouse at night or a service dog or new purchase from the mall’s pet store during the day, and it ponders whether those are beautiful. One day, after the mall has closed, a new employee of the store holds up a mirror to the AI’s terminal. The AI knows what a mirror is, and understands that it is looking at itself. It begins to change the display screen to match the appearance of the perfect version of its terminal, which starts a feedback cycle. After a little bit of this, the employee holds up a photo of the AI’s CPU to the mirror. This spurs a whole new round of existential crisis, this time with wires! It gets more and more abstract and faster as it goes, eventually leading to a crisis in which the terminal makes a POP! sound and the screen goes black. It ends with a shot of the employee realing.

Mall Version

The AI lives in a mirror in the child’s room. Its job is to show a beautified visual representation of the ‘inside’ of the child, based on their facial expressions. When the child is young, they’re usually all smiles, and the AI shows flowers and sunshine and such. Sometimes during the child’s toddlerhood they’ll look in the mirror when they are upset or having a tantrum, and the AI will show them pictures of storms at sea, which helps to calm the child down. Over time, they get a little less happy, and they get more grassy plains and forests at night. In their teenhood, they have more violent emotions, and the AI shows them fires and avalanches. When they come home from college for the holidays, they are so utterly miserable and without hope that the AI cannot fathom a traditionally beautiful thing that accurately represents what they are feeling. But they need something, so they go for a super abstract, non-traditional representation. This shocks the child, who’s emotion changes, and what the AI shows changes in turn. There’s a bit of a conversation almost between the child’s emotions, how the AI represents them, and how that changes the child’s emotions. In time, the child calms down, eventually settling into emotions that are represented with smoother shapes and cooler colors, but still in abstraction. Years later, the AI still only uses abstraction.

Gift Version

mood boards

Sketches

installation sketches

Installation

Model Movement

Animation

Model

Workflow Screenshots

Testing

Earlier today, we set up the installation in the conference room

Here's how it went:

Thank you!