Humans have been very interested in how others see them from an early age. How other people see him anyway, but also, for example, the saber-toothed tigers. That helps with camouflage. So if you follow the thought experiment that artificial intelligence (AI) is a new being on this planet that is not a living being, but is now an omnipresent something, you would like to know how that sees you now. The English professor for cognitive robotics Murray Shanahan likes to explain such phenomena with quotes from Ludwig Wittgenstein. An experiment by the American digital culture critic Clive Thompson is much more understandable. It simply follows the educational paths with which a very large part of humanity is helping artificial intelligence to find its way around the physical world. This is done via the access controls of the captcha function.
In the images of the Captcha grids, the whole world is a single American suburb
Almost all users have already come across the captcha image grid with the sixteen squares on the Internet. This is a free service from Google. You have to prove to the machine that you are a human and not a bot by solving a task. For example, click on all pictures with zebra crossings, or with traffic lights, buses, taxis or stairs. Only then do you get access to the desired page on which bots are not wanted. As is well known, nothing is free on the Internet, which is why you work for a few seconds for these tasks for Google’s AI department, which feeds AIs for self-driving cars with the captcha data.
If you now, like Clive Thompson, embrace the view that this is the world that is looking at AI, you can easily follow your path into the tribulation. It is a dreary world full of deceptive sunshine that opens up. Even the sporadic palm trees cannot change that. You don’t want to live in this world. But you do. Even if it is of course a predominantly American world, because artificial intelligences are still mainly trained in America. There they are not very different from the humane model students of this world, who all want to go to Stanford, Princeton or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The first thing that strikes you is the sadness of the landscape shots, which were obviously taken in stark contrast to the radiant natural wonders of the screensavers and desktop backgrounds in the wasteland of suburbia. The slight horror sets in because there are no people in this world of AI. At best, you can see them in the shadows behind the windows of the vehicles or on the zebra crossings. So this is how AI sees us. As a biomechanical element of other machines or as an obstacle on the connection from location A to destination B. Why not? People first recognize the similarities or the dangers in their counterparts.
The exhibition is hidden behind a QR code – bad without a functioning network
Then there is the bizarre aesthetic. The sixteen squares don’t just divide the world into a pattern of oppressive simplicity. The perspective also shifts the world in the coordinates of machines. Too sloping, too high, too deep. There is no golden ratio, no eye level and no panorama. The radical utilitarianism of the machines turns into an inhuman gaze that only knows goals and flaws.
The world, rasterized: Google uses captcha images to keep bots away from websites – and collects data for artificial intelligence in the process.
(Photo: Screenshot from Google)
Too dreary, too dreary? It is not as if there have not long been attempts to teach AI about beauty, music and friendliness. At the Architecture Biennale in Venice, the team of curators of the German pavilion immediately relocated its contribution to the cloud, that mythical abode of artificial intelligence between the silicon clouds of the storage farms and the fiberglass arteries of the network. The great emptiness welcomes you there. Plate-sized QR codes on the walls serve as portals into the cloud pavilion, in which the Story of the year 2038 is told. It’s a beautiful story. A redemption fable from a time in which the great crises of the twenties will be overcome, the climate catastrophe, the pandemics, the social upheavals. Only the emptiness remains on site. Artificial intelligence is deaf. She only plays scraps on the cell phone, which is supposed to serve as the key to her world. If it weren’t for the nasty Italian network, the lame server. The heat? The humid climate of the lagoon? So you stand lost in front of the codes and only later see on the computer which world has remained closed. A world of pastel and pink pixels, as smooth and supple as one would like the future to be. Even if it looks like a video game from the last century.
But even this look does not make you happy for long. You move with an avatar between videos, always along the re-pixelated walls of the pavilion. So this is how AI sees us? As a control function and as so-called content.
Speaking of content: the pavilion may have remained empty. There is the fable of 2038 for it as wonderful book published by Sorry-Press-Verlag in Munich. Does AI perceive analog reading as a betrayal? Time to study your gaze further. That helps with camouflage.