INTERVIEWS WITH ARTIFICIAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DMITRY PARANYUSHKIN
For one year I’ve been taking photographs of anything I could find around me on my iPhone. These photographs were submitted to Amazon Recommends application, which then finds the best match to the photo on Amazon.Co.Uk online shop using artificial intelligence and image recognition technology. When artificial intelligence falls short of recognizing the suitable product, the image gets sent to Mechanical Turk (mturk.com). This website, owned and run by Amazon, is an online marketplace for “mechanical” routine low-paid jobs. Each job called a “HIT” (e.g. an image to match to a product on Amazon) gets posted to the website and it is then performed by the people (mainly from China and India), who earn a few cents for their work. Amazon calls the people who do the “HITS” on Mechanical Turk “Artificial Articial Intelligence”, because they are supposed to do the work that artificial intelligence cannot do yet. This book catalogues our interactions in chronological order. On the left side of the page is the image I sent to Amazon with the time and description. On the right side of the page is the image and text I received in return, usually within seconds or minutes. 30 June 2011 Dmitry Paranyushkin Berlin
Published by PLAYBerlin Imprint PB002PM www.playberlin.com 3 Am Flutgraben, 12435, Berlin, Germany Š 2011 Dmitry Paranyushkin www.deemeetree.com www.iaaibook.com Some images courtesy of Amazon.Co.Uk Special thanks to artificial intelligence and to the unknown human workforce behind mturk.com who did the job. Special thanks to Diego Agullo and Johannes Wengel, all my friends, and Les Ballets C de la B’s SI participants.
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The World View of the Artificial Artificial Intelligence by Diego Agullo Etymologycally speaking, the word interpretation or to interpret comes from Latin interpres, interpretis and its older sense can be translated as intermediary negotiation. Inter means in between and pret means to buy and sell. It seems to have the same root as price (pretium) precious (pretiosus) and appreciation (appretiatio) and thus interpretation can be understood as a way to put a price or give a value to something. I would like to use this assertion to approach the phenomenon of the Artificial Artificial Intelligence (AAI) not only as a process of recognition and recommendation of objects on sale but as a whole machinery of interpretation of the world, an intermediary negotiator that gives value to our closest reality. In the past, trading and business between different cultures needed the role of the interpes as the person in charge to translate the values between different codes. Today the interpres has adopted the form of an iphone´s application that follows certain translation criteria that Dimitry Paranyushkin´s book reflects accurately: there is no interpretation that doesn´t imply judgment. How the Amazon´s AAI has interpreted Paranyushkin´s world? What is the judgement criteria that AAI uses to translate one image into another one? How is it possible that the Krumme Lanke lake in Berlin becomes the Maldives beach? I would like to draw attention to understanding this recognition process of images sent by Amazon costumers as a process of interpretation that uses specific criteria in order to recreate the world that those images belong to, hence the possibility to idealize one reality. Which reality? Not the one that is surrounding us but the one that corresponds to the world in stock. The apprehension system of the AAI is fascinating, as well as the process of synthesis and recognition of an image, but I find much more triggering how AAI translates the image A into a single image B. This is the difference between Google Image Similarity that gives you back a multitude of images (and therefore the problem is different: the ranking) and AAI that gives you back just one single image (one-to-one).
The image from the world in stock that AAI sends back has two different values. The first one is, indeed, a price expressed by an amount of money. This type of value is predictable; in order to buy the object I have to pay. Nevertheless the second value translates the first image into a value judgment, not in terms of what is good or bad but, instead of that, offers a certain image of the world that confronts my own world and therefore introduces the question of how my reality should look like in relation to the world in stock. If we remember the Plato´s theory of Forms or theory of Ideas, Plato interprets the material world as a poor imitation (mimesis) of the true world of the Forms. AAI renders a process of mimesis but, as Aristotle noted, there is no mimesis without poiesis, meaning that every imitation involves a process of recreation. The fact that they call it recommendation tool is just a simple way to hide the purposes of making something desirable or attractive and to magnify the reality that awaits in stock to be sold. Through the process of recommending, they translate the world into a new value, not only putting price but also being worthy of confidence to make us believe that what constitutes our world demands to be renewed, replaced and instigating us to know how our world could be constantly improved. It´s not casual that most of the photos Paranyushkin got back are cleaning products, guides to improve knowledge, accesories, new objects and hyper-aestheticized images. AAI appreciates our world as an unfinished world, as something to be completed and improved, to be renewed or that needs to be cleaned. There are 5 prominent criteria that AAI uses to interpret an image: magnifying (my world is ugly or dirty), guiding (my world needs to be improved), synthesizing (my world can be simplified), completing (my world has a lack), hallucinating (my world is too imprecise to be appreciated). To get back a similar product found doesn´t mean at all similarity, there is a process of poiesis that considers the first image as something that it has a lack and it needs to be recreated or affected in order to fulfill and to approach the preciousness of the world in stock, that in this sense would correspond to the Plato´s world of Forms, a limbo or paradise where the reality exists timeless in its full beauty, the precious world where things don´t get old or dirty. They stay
pristine until they are delivered to a costumer and starting the process of deterioration But what about the impossibility of the non interpretation. Is the whole reality susceptible of being interpreted by the intermediary negociator? Can everything be an input for the AAI to recommend an object from the stock? Even Paranyushkin´s most blurry images get a recommendation. We could think that nothing escapes from the process of interpretation and that every piece of reality has correspondence with the world in stock even if the criteria is an hallucination. But there is one moment on this book when AAI has vertigo. I am talking about An installation of a dying old woman at a museum in Antwerp that becomes Brocade – Velvet Bedsheet white / Brocade Bedspreads. AAI sees, in fact, the bed and it gets translated into a nice big bed, but the corpse of the old woman is ignored. Why? In the world in stock death doesn´t constitute any value. Death is invisible and the non interpretable par excellence. AAI can no longer recognize what the thing is because is incommensurable for the market, death is not inside the categories of Amazon, death represents the sublime for the apprehension system of AAI. Summarizing, the biggest idea behind the AAI phenomenon is the Weltanschauung or the world view. Amazon is actually selling a comprehensive view of the world and human life where the world in stock represents the true style of life. If I ask myself how my world should look like, I just need to start mapping my world and send it to an AAI. Amazon will replace my world. How would the world look like created fully by Amazon´s recommendations? Dmitry Paranyushkin already got his answer. But how would the world look like if, instead of Amazon, there was another entity behind with a different world view?
From: Dmitry Paranyushkin <d@deemeetree.com> Subject: Confession Date: 20 June 2011 21:40:41 CEST To: recommends@amazon.co.uk
Dear Artificial Artificial Intelligence It’s been a year already that we’ve known each other. During this time we corresponded on numerous occasions and it’s always been a revelation. I remember how it all started. I sent you a photo of a flusk and you responded with an even better one back. I sent you a picture of my shoe and you kindly sent me back a cleaning product. I sent you a photo of my belly and your reply was the book on getting a better body. I sent you Bruce Nauman’s installation with light tubes and you responded with a manual on how to use the neon lights. I sent you a picture of a dead person lying in a bed and you offered those nice blue bedsheets back. I know that you wish me only the best. I also learned from you, dear artificial artificial intelligence, that there is no limit to improvement and progress. You are absolutely right: in this world that we live in things will only get better. And I know you are making money on all this, but then I even bought some stuff you recommended to me, so I guess that’s one of those win-win situations. I have to admit I tried testing you, seeing how far you would go. But you don’t believe in censorship, you strive on anything that flows freely. You sent me nice colorful pipes for my hash, and on another occasion politely ignored what looked like a line of coke, recommending me a book on barcodes instead. When you see naked bodies, you tell me how they could be made to look better; when you see one guy sucking another guy’s cock, you send me DVDs on better gay sex. And you are a true romantic, because each time I was in a weird mood and sent you something confusing, you’d often offer me some epic music back. Who are you then? I guess you are some kind of a hybrid between machines and humans. You complement each other. The machine does the routine work and leaves the creative stuff to the imagination of humans. The imagination of thousands workers logging in every day from India, China, Europe, Cambodia, US. The collective conscious or unconscious. Or maybe both. You do a great job in matching the world to its products. I am sure there will be more of you in the future.
You like to learn. That’s why you send me books so often. Because books can also help us improve and become better human beings. That’s why I made this book. It is for you. It’s an attempt to describe you. To write your biography. To know you better. It was inspired by you and half of it was actually created by you. Maybe it will also help you improve, brush up your skills, and become a better artificial artifical intelligence. Maybe it will just entertain you. In any case I think we both definitely learned something new. And please, make sure to recommend this book to your other friends of which I’m sure you have quite many. All the best, Dmitry Paranyushkin
INTERVIEWS WITH ARTIFICIAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BY DMITRY PARANYUSHKIN (AUTHOR) PRICE: £30.00 IN STOCK.
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