Expo: Close encounters

For a long time we thought that language comprehension distinguished humans from computers. But with the rise of advanced AI, like ChatGPT, computers seem to be speaking more and more like humans. 

One of the characteristics of human language is the ability to ‘deny’ or ‘invert’ text: to translate something from true to false. Denial is essential for logical thinking, but also for understanding irony or abstract concepts such as ‘nothing’. 

The End of Individuals is an installation by Katarina Petrović in which she challenges an AI (artificial intelligence) to negatively translate Charles Darwin’s world-famous On the Origin of Species (1859). In other words: to give Darwin’s theory of evolution an opposite meaning from how we know it. The installation is an artistic language experiment that examines the extent to which a computer can understand human language.  

On the screens we see the specially created software at work. It depicts the relationship between words and sentences in a branched pattern – just as Darwin’s theory of evolution can be visualized: a pattern in which all species can be traced back to one common ancestor. 

The End of Individuals shows the unexplored side of AI: can a machine learn to deny, think creatively and write poetry? 

This exhibition is a collaboration between InScience Film Festival and Platform POST under the name Close Encounters: an exhibition space where art and science meet. This edition was made possible by the Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie.