Adam Chin

Description

Unprompted: The Emergence of Conscious AI Conscious AI is the hypothesized state where artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and achieves a sense of consciousness. This is the moment AI crosses the boundary to what we consider to be human. Long the domain of science-fiction, the recent rapid rise of AI technology has made talk of Conscious AI much more possible. While we have yet to achieve Conscious AI, the conversational abilities of leading chatbots already give a good simulation of consciousness. Unprompted is an analogy, a visual metaphor, for the emergence of Conscious AI. This photographic portrait series poses the question of what Conscious AI will “look” like if or when it happens. How human will it be? How much will it be like us, and how different will it be? And ultimately, how will we define what it means to be human?

Process

I do not think about this question at all.

Tools

The photographic portraits in Unprompted were generated by AI. Approximately 650 photographs of each subject were used in the training of the AI. The AI was tasked with generating an image that looked like one of the original 650 photographs. No other images were used and no artwork was appropriated from any other artist. No language prompts were used. The AI was unguided in its generation of each of these portraits. The 650 photographs of each subject are actually selfies. The subjects take the photos themselves using a remote trigger to the camera. The artist does not watch the subjects take the selfies. Thus, this AI image is made out of 650 selfies. Is this then an AI self-portrait? The AI program used to generate the images is an open-source implementation of the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model algorithm. Approximately 1,000 images of each subject were generated, and the artist selected just one for the final portrait. The final portrait was produced in a traditional b&w wet darkroom.