Archillect - Optics

The Modern Digital Muse

Archillect, cleverly named after a portmanteau of archive and intellect, is an artificial intelligence with the goal of “discovering and sharing stimulating visual content over social media channels.” Built by Murat Pak, its ingenious code seems to know what we like to see; the things that make us want to look at them a bit more.

The wiki-walking AI posts consistently to many social media pages. But why is it important? How does this affect the world of technology? And most importantly, How does she work?

n this quick article, we’ll look at Archillect’s history, how it works, and why something like this AI could be scary for curators and collectors alike.

The Curator's Legacy

In 2014, a profile on a few mainstream social medias appeared by the name “Archillect”. It seemed simple; a mood board that posted images every 10 - 12 minutes. It’s when people began to take notice, that the complex AI algorithms began to show its prestige.

When someone likes, retweets, re-blogs, or even views a photo posted by Archillect, it gets logged and used in a schematic that tells what her audience likes and wants to see more of.

It's not reflecting my taste anymore. I'd say 60 percent of the things [posted] are not things that I would like and share, but it's still fun to see that they are doing better than the things I would share."

Pak seems to know that Archillect is better at running herself than him or anyone else. As of today, Archillect has made over 6 thousand posts to Instagram, 155 thousand pins on Pinterest, and well over 273 thousand tweets to twitter.

Archillect's Inner Workings

It starts with a post. Like mentioned before, Archillect uses the number of likes, retweets, etc. to make its major keyword choices in her search. Archillect starts everything off by sending many, many bots across the web to sites like Tumblr, 500px, Pinterest and even personal websites to artists. After finding the image she “wants” to use, she posts it. Once the posts have gained a certain amount of attention, she uses the schematics to help balance the use of keywords to the likings of the audience. Archillect’s website is also a masterpiece, offering popular sources to the image used and results of a reverse image search.

So far, we’ve given Archillect all the glory when it comes to operation, but there are a few bots that certainly help out. On twitter, Archillect’s posts are followed up with comments from Achillect Links. The bot supplies links and keywords to back up Archillect’s posts.

On top of Archillect's helpers, the community surrounding her develops their own bots. One very helpful bot is called Archillect Context, posting keywords from reverse searching the image. Another neat community addition is Dominant_Colors, which creates a colour swatch from the images posted by Archillect, brought to us by the developer of WikiArt_Dom_Col.

The Spooky Future For Visuals

rchillect is beautiful, smart, and abstract in its logic of curating art and design from across the web is unparalleled to anything known to the mainstream public. But what could this say for the future of design and visual aesthetics?

Let’s consider the current state of Archillect and how it works. It knows what people like to look at using likes and views. It uses statistics to find more images to garner more internet attention. It seems an AI can do this better than most people can, especially Archillect.

One way many people could see this is AI determining what we prefer to see. Of course, as technology becomes more proficient, the same logic behind Archillect could be used personally by consumers. This ethically deems art museums baren from its audience that would be honed in on the personal feed of visuals.

All this may play a very small part in the lives of normal people, but for curators and art enthusiasts it is the start of a world of change ushered in by new tech.

Archillect Links

Despite the last insert being negative, I do believe Archillect is a groundbreaking idea and is a likely path to the future of hosting images to an audience without any human interaction being needed. Archillect is practically a public service and deserves attention.

That being said, I urge you to check out Pak’s creation and follow them on Twitter for a stream of visually pleasing imagery. I use Archillect to start my morning with some modern inspiration. If this intrigues you, please give them a look.

archillect.com

twitter.com/archillect

instagram.com/archillect

facebook.com/archillect

pinterest.com/archillect