Anastasiia Belousova is a media artist, based in Berlin. She graduated with a BA in the field of Media art in St.-P, Russia and as a DAAD scholarship holder she completed with a MA of art at h_da, Darmstadt, Germany. She was twice a grant winner at the Salzburg Summer Academy (2020, 2021). During 2021 she was an online resident of Kunsthalle Darmstadt.
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Proposal:
As text messaging has become a common, high-frequency method of communication, it was only a matter of time before pre-written, customizable and even smart replies were introduced. Pre-written responses have been around before smartphones, but responses are getting better all the time. artificial intelligence is helping to suggest appropriate responses, making them semantically and syntactically appropriate. There are apps that provide the opportunity to use super-smart reply suggestions, though they write flatly emotionlessly and only serve to convey information (for example “WhatsAuto”, “Reply” by Google (until 2018). We are interested in the idea of artificial Intelligence that enables people to have a conversation where they don't have to answer themselves anymore, artificial intelligence that creates smart, emotional and meaningful responses. One-click is all it takes to generate an authentic response. A response that conveys more than place and time, or "I can't right now." An answer that includes feelings, opinions, avoids arguments or solves dilemmas. We think that this type of communication can influence on social life. A personal AI that is trained to imitate you. What kind of ethic issues may automatic replies which not just provide short answers but can develop conversations and influence on the relationship with other people raise? What if users were able to maintain friendships digitally without having to participate in the chat and if so, what would these conversations look like? The imagination of having a personal AI which periodically writes to your friends, like asking how they are, or automatically dropping off topics for you to keep the conversation going is frightening, because AI influences on your personal life too much. If your interlocutor understood that it is your personal robot who they are communicating with, maybe they would not take you so seriously. What if two personal AIs, yours and your friend's start a conversation? Could we learn anything from them? Can AI suggest some alternative topics of conversation or inspire us to use a politer tone? What if artificial intelligence recognizes the nuances of our language as good as we do, or even better? Will it know our writing self better than we do? It can help us to avoid being passive aggressive. What if our counterpart also responds only utilizing AI - have we then created a new friendship? How does it feel to find out I've shared all my intimacies, feelings, and opinions with a machine? Am I mad at my counterpart's disinterest, or mad about privacy, or both? Would such a dialogue be considered artificial? Our project would be an internet artwork about a conversation between two AI's that each resemble a human chat with each other. Thereby we conduct artistic research on artificial intelligence and ethics within human communication.
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