What’s that my dudes, you say it’s…Wednesday?
That’s right Unreality gang. It’s a brand new year and a brand new chapter in this totally radical journey. We’re getting unreal up in here 2022-styley and everyone’s invited (but please let me know if you’re bringing a plus one so I can make sure there’s enough pizza to go round).
As my long time besties (subscribers) will know, I reluctantly had to take a hiatus from Unreality at the end of last year. Sadly I just got far too busy with actual work (the kind that pays the bills) so this newsletter-shaped delight had to take a temporary backseat. But now we’re back for good - this time at a slower pace to ensure I can give it the love and attention it deserves. From now on you can expect a funky-fun and friendly-fresh new email from me on the first Wednesday of every month. I hope you’re excited.
So…where were we?
A lot has happened in the world of unreality since we last spoke. I mean, Tiger King 2 anyone?? It’s tricky to know where to jump back in, so I thought I’d start by returning to a topic from last year that I never actually wrapped up for you lovely folks - Third Space AI
If you cast your mind all the way back to last year (gosh it seems forever ago doesn’t it?) you might remember I was part of a project called Coventry Creates that supported researcher / artist collaborations. I was introduced to the really rather impressive Dr Kevin Walker, whose research focus is artificial intelligence. If you missed it first time around, you can read what I had to say in the early stages of the project.
Conveniently, during the period we were working on this project, both Kevin and I were granted access to the OpenAI (then private) beta for GPT-3. GPT-3 (the successor to GPT-2, which was initially not fully released due to supposed fear of misuse) is a remarkably impressive AI model that attempts to generate an appropriate text output based on any given prompt.
For example, bar this sentence, the rest of this paragraph was generated via the OpenAI API. This is a paragraph that was generated by a machine learning model. It is not a human writing this. It’s certainly an impressive model, and I’m really pleased to have been able to work on it at this early stage of development. If you’re interested in the technical details of how it works, I’ll be covering that in a future post1, but for now I’m going to focus on the creative process.
This access allowed me to have a lot of fun co-authoring some of the Third Space project quite seamlessly with actual AI. See more examples of cool GTP-3 use cases.
The AI, The Oracle & I
The eventual outcome of my collaboration with Kevin is the interactive Third Space AI website. At its heart is a favourite of ours here at Unreality - good old apophenia.
To quote me:
Apophenia refers to the way humans are so naturally inclined to see patterns in things that they often perceive connections that don’t really exist.
Throughout this newsletter I’ve regularly made reference to the huge part that apophenia plays in my work and my life as a whole, and the minute the topic arose naturally in my discussions with Kevin I was, of course, delighted. The notion of identifying connections is central to AI and machine learning, which functions pretty much entirely on the basis of identifying patterns in data. It brought a brand new player into the picture when it comes to the endless unanswerable questions surrounding how one defines when perceived connections are real vs an instance of apophenia. How does a machine determine which patterns are meaningful? Does AI experience apophenia?
The AI, The Oracle & I, an experimental piece of hypertext, was created in direct response to this. What are the differences (and similarities) between these three seemingly disparate sources of prediction and interpretation? This work was one of a number of outcomes from this collaboration that have become part of the Third Space AI website, which is my way of beginning to collate some of these creative responses together in one place.
Have a click around and let me know what you think. Without overloading you too much with conceptual background, I’ll at least highlight that each individual experience with the work is intended to be, to an extent, unique. The ‘intelligence’ of artificial intelligence is based on the information you use to teach it - it is primed entirely by what it encounters before you ask for its response. As such I hope that audience interpretations of Third Space AI as an artwork will be (subconsciously at least) informed by individual experience.
It’s very much an ongoing work (so be nice!) I am keen to develop it further and implement more functionality, and I’m certainly far from reaching the conclusion to this area of inquiry.
My goodness I forgot how easily these newsletters start getting long. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of a topic here but hopefully it’s enough to get you thinking critically and creatively about the relationship between AI, divination and apophenia.
For further intriguing exploration in this area check out David Benque’s almanac.computer which brilliantly frames some of these concerns within the context of almanac publications. The work itself is currently offline, but I highly recommend the accompanying ‘Cosmic Spreadsheets’ text.
Many thanks to you for sticking around during the hiatus. Here’s to a year of more weird and surprising Unreality content. Don’t forget to tell your friends!
Edie x
I absolutely will not. I think that’s the AI trying to set me up to have to explain a technology that goes over my head. Cheeky.
This is great, and so thought-provoking that it makes my brain ache as I set off down all the rabbit holes which you have so lucidly pointed out. As a young vet, I used "pattern recognition" all the time to aid in diagnosis but nowadays such reflex activity is shunned in favour of "evidence based medicine". It is high time we acknowledged the similarities between the oracles of ancient history and our modern day Google results. "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy..." Happy New Year, and may you have all the strength of the Tiger to see you through 2022.