Part human, part machine writing. We are increasingly offloading a lot of our mental and subjective tasks to machines. In every such interaction, we effectively authorise the machine to momentarily substitute for our mind with its own intelligence, taking decisions and executing (its) plans on our behalf. We achieve an output and feel ownership of it, without explicitly knowing how we achieved it. We have become so accustomed to internalizing this substituted mind, that we do not even acknowledge its authorship in our tasks, let alone reflect on its influence in our everyday thoughts and actions. For this work, we create a handwriting system, where a machine continues a sentence started by a human to write out its own thoughts. What’s the effect if our own thoughts and actions write all the content, half of it, quarter, none? Offloading how much control to the machine is enough? Also, a lot of entities and their intelligences are involved in writing this piece of paper- the user, the machine, the creator of the program, the various people whose text and thoughts for the part of the dataset- all that eventually makes the machine write something. This already happens in our everyday lives to some extent, often without us explicitly realising. However, once carried in the context of such a subjective task, does it make us more aware of the multitude of intelligences we inherit in our everyday tasks?
How do we ultimately extend this experience to rethinking the balance of authorship and authorisation in our lives, especially as machines continue to grow in their intelligence? The system uses 2 AI algorithms- one trained on human handwriting and the other philosophical texts from the Gutenberg library that completes the human prompt or thought.
This work was created while in residency at Yasuaki Kakehi Lab, Japan.
