This week, our group for Assignment 4 started planning the details for our project, and I’m excited to get started. We decided we wanted our project to capture all of the emotions AI can evoke, especially the eeriness, uncanniness, and creepiness we often feel when confronted with AI in its various forms. With that in mind, we wanted our project to be interactive, allowing our audience to experience those emotions in a more personal and firsthand way.

Thinking about how to truly encapsulate those emotions, I’m keeping in mind how to heighten those feelings in the environment where our project will be displayed at the exhibition. This adds to the excitement of our assignment, as it gives us the liberty to create and showcase our concept beyond just a classroom setting. The fact that our project will incorporate the creativity of my teammates makes me excited, reinforcing the idea I discussed in my Week 9 blog, where humans are the ones behind AI. Our personal influences, inspirations, and ideas will be merged into one project, alongside the ‘collective imaginary’ that is AI (Ervik 2023: 52).

My team members have different ideas they want to add to our project—things that reflect our individual interests and add diversity to the tabs, like an AI dating site, an alien/UFO sightings tab, and an art tab. This way, we can explore how AI appears in various parts of society and question whether that should be a cause for concern, especially when distinguishing what’s real from what’s fake. That’s something I can understand the discomfort around, particularly given how AI can generate such realistic images, which is also part of the appeal.

We’ve started generating AI profiles, and it’s amazing how realistic some of them look. While it can be difficult to nail down specific features because too many words or descriptions seem to get lost in translation with AI generators, it’s still cool to see what the AI comes up with from minimal guidance. I’m intrigued by the duality of working with AI—the idea of relinquishing full control to let the generator create what it can, versus the frustration of not being able to control every detail to match your vision. It will be interesting to see how our project turns out with the different factors involved, such as each teammate’s individual expectations and creative visions, as well as the collaboration with AI. That diversification of input adds to the unpredictability of working with AI as a collaborator.

 

References

Ervik A (2023) Generative AI and the Collective Imaginary: The Technology- Guided Social Imagination in AI-Imagenesis. The international journal of the image. https://rmit.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/61RMIT_INST/4t5l5f/cdi_cristin_nora_10852_109478