OVERALL PROJECT INTRODUCTION:
Drawing inspiration from the philosophical musings of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and ancient Chinese Arithmancy divination practices, the art project Changes: Is AI the Truth of Fate or the Joke? explores the chaotic and indeterminacy elements of human existence through the view of AI.
One of the outcomes of this art project is the art installation Changes v1.0 AI robot. This installation juxtaposes the ancient and the modern, merging traditional Chinese divination method I Ching, which utilize some mathematical formulas of occult sciences to divinate destiny, with the precision and predictive power of AI. In this hybrid space, visitors are invited to engage in an act of futuristic augury: making wishes to AI god. This ritualistic interaction lets the viewers to reflect on the absurdity and possible future direction of surrendering human destiny to machine AI.
Is human destiny a chaotic system that collapses into a predetermined outcome upon observation? This question echoes the principles of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, where the act of observation influences the state of a system. This art project posits that as AI grows increasingly sophisticated, capable of simulating and predicting human behavior, it may serve as a modern oracle, dictating the course of our futures in ways both unsettling and enlightening. By engaging with this art project, viewers are prompted to consider whether the traditional human quest for understanding and controlling fate has merely transformed rather than evolved, as we now place our hopes and inquiries into the hands of digital deities.
In another outcome illustrations of this art project, you will see artist Liu using illustration medium to refine the worldview setting behind Changes: Is AI the Truth of Fate or the Joke? project. Liu fictionalizes a future human society ruled by AI robots. This future earth is a world where occult magic and advanced-science coexist, and residents living in this world always request AI robots to help predict the fate of things when faced with all decision-making problems. In this future world, AI robots become divinators/prophets/religious leader who hold the highest social positions. They use AI robots' most proficient I Ching divination techniques and super accurate prediction results to completely replace human divinators. And these AI robots are constantly helping their human followers predict and answer all the problems encountered in human life, and timely plan and arrange fate for humans.
* This art project is a practice extension based the paper Arguments for the Rise of Artificial Intelligence Art: Does AI Art Have Creativity, Motivation, Self-awareness and Emotion? published (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/aris.83808) by Liu during his undergraduate studies in 2022-2023.
KEYWORDS: Artificial Intelligence; Human-computer Interaction; Programming; Deep Learning; Future; Interdisciplinary; Graphic Design; Ethics and Morality of AI; Art Installation; Innovative Design
