“The creativity of culture has no outcome, no conclusion. It does not result in art works, artifacts, products. Creativity is a continuity that engenders itself in others.”

James P. Carse wrote that in his cult classic Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility (1986) and it comes to mind while regarding the works of Alexander Reben, an MIT trained roboticist and artist, whose work plays with boundaries. As he says to me when we speak, “unexpected outputs are always fun.” This is particularly true of his most recent body of work AI Am I? Here, he collaborates with the machine to produce physical works that question notions of creativity and authorship––as Duchamp established more than one hundred years ago and conceptual art, et al simply reinforced. So that’s not particularly interesting. What does become interesting is the way Reben turns the vast critical dialogue surrounding art into a creative space.

For AI Am I?, Reben uses OpenAI’s GPT, a third generation language processing deep learning model, to develop initial text that he feeds back into the system. That produces a description of the work as well as critical commentary about it. The fake artist names are generated from a neural network trained on names. So, from this initial sample starter text: This sculpture consists of zip ties attached to the links in a nearly hundred foot chain hung across a room, on the floor or from hooks on a wall. The zip ties alternate colour from orange to black and the chain is coloured silver.

GPT develops multi-paragraph analyses, each with a different interpretation. I have extracted the main thesis of each output below, but recognize the full text includes formal analyses of the work appropriately tied to these concepts :

1. This sculpture is a commentary on the growing influence of technology and its effect on the environment.

2. This sculpture is a commentary on the restraints modern society puts on the human soul by limiting our creativity, free will, and individuality.

3. This sculpture is a commentary on the potential negative consequences of nuclear weapons as well as an acknowledgement of the lack of accountability for their worldwide production, stockpiling, and use.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.