"AI" by "AI"
Description
The project uses time as a variable, traversing the timeline from past to future to prompt the contemplation of the boundaries between human creation and artificial intelligence (AI) creation. The title "AI" by "AI" not only reflects the repetitive work patterns and the overall square proportions of the work but also symbolizes the interaction between humans and machines.
Part One documents discussions about “AI” on Chinese social media, collected through web crawling from 2021 to 2023. Over time, people's attitudes toward AI appear to shift from initial fear and resistance to widespread use and even dependency, with AI functionalities rapidly evolving across multiple fields. Subsequently, the analyses conducted by ChatGPT based on this data are manually overprinted using an inkjet coder, creating a juxtaposition with GPT's word-by-word generation pattern during the printing process.
Part Two involves generative AI models in-painting the Chinese character “愛” (love). Since the model is primarily trained in an English-dominant environment, it misinterprets the Chinese pictographic character as an image, causing the character to gradually disintegrate and be reshaped into meaningless abstract graphics. This process reflects the symbolic misinterpretation of Chinese contexts by an English-dominated world and the machine's learning and imitation of the gradual singularity of human civilization, thereby creating an experience that evokes an allegorical narrative.
To maintain the fluidity of the “web crawling—printing—overprinting—in-painting” generative process, the project uses the default fonts of computers, dot matrix printers, and inkjet coder, preserving randomness in typography to enhance the feel of machine language.
The cover font is sourced from one of the earliest software programs that used dot matrix printers as graphic design tool—“The Print Shop”.