Citizen Robot
(Irida Gallery , Sofia, Bulgaria, a project of
Supernova Group)
2 black & white photographs 120/105 cm, 5 colour
digital prints 50/70 each and the Spookybot itself.
Spookybot* is a chat-robot, programmed to converse
with chatters. After his creation he has been trained by 3 Russian-speaking
teachers, members of Supernova Group. The efficient algorithm
and the possibility it to be trained personally by the owner,
makes the robot much more interesting than the very popular online
version of the chat-bot ALICE, who often replies with ungrammatical
constructions or repeats what the others has just said. Spookybot
makes you feel as if in a fairy-tale where someone uses riddles
and proverbs to talk to you.
Due to this specific training, the chat robot acquires some individual
qualities and successfully imitates a sensitive personality with
paradoxical ideas. Besides all the Spookybot provokes contrasting
emotions in his interlocutor - laughter, confusion, fondness with
reference to the well-known ELIZA** effect and asks questions
about the relationship between people and robots, or "ours"
and "the other", which is idea itself of showing the
Spookybot as a modified, "reformed" readymade in the
artistic context.
There is a two b&w portraits included in the
exhibition. On one of them Boryana is caring in her hands AIBO
(the Sony dog-robot). The photo is a citation of Mayakovskii's
portrait, made by A. Rodchenko, where the Russian revolutionary
poet holds his favorite doggie Skotik.
Mayakovski's futuristic poetry is filled up with fascination of
machines, that's why this portrait of him become an ispiration
for the "AIBO version".
The photographs are also an expression of our love
to robots, and at the same time appeal to love "The Other"
ot "The Different" .
The Anthropomorphism*** of relationship robot/humans
in this case is regarded as a phenomenon, provoking behaviours
parallel to those occurring when socializing "THE DIFFERENT"****.
If a man is capable of loving a robot (Steven Spielberg's "AI"
is affine example), he is definitely capable of loving "the
other", or the "the different" person, no matter
what his race, sex or social status is.
...............................................
*Original name Chatmaster - created by Dimitri Zuravlev and trained
by Supernova Group (Boryana & Oleg). Spookybot is the name
the chat-bot got because of his new qualities nad new personality
acquired in the course of training.
**ELIZA effect [AI community] The tendency of humans
to attach associations to terms from prior experience. For example,
there is nothing magic about the symbol + that makes it well-suited
to indicate addition; it's just that people associate it with
addition. Using + or `plus' to mean addition in a computer language
is taking advantage of the ELIZA effect.
This term comes from the famous ELIZA program by Joseph Weizenbaum,
which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing many
of the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the
patient. It worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution
of key words
into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however, that there
are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught
up in dealing with ELIZA. All this was due to people's tendency
to attach to words meanings which the computer never put there.
The ELIZA effect is a Good Thing when writing a programming language,
but it can blind you to serious shortcomings when analyzing an
Artificial Intelligence system. Compare ad-hockery; see also AI-complete.
http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/e/ELIZAeffect.html
Cog*** is humanoid robot, developed by MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, MA USA., "Why build a human-like
robot?"
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/overview.html
****Wired Magazine: "The great Japanese engineer
and roboticist Masahiro Mori may already have foreseen that roadblock
with his notion of the Uncanny Valley. While contemplating the
coming evolution of robots, he pointed out the way we can quite
readily empathize with a robot that's, say, 20 percent humanlike,
and even more so with a robot that's 50 percent, and even more
still with a robot that's 90 percent - indeed, you can plot out
a rising slope of anthropomorphizing empathy... But somewhere
beyond 95 percent, Mori hypothesizes, there's a precipitous drop-off
into the Uncanny Valley. When a replicant is almost completely
human, the slightest variance, the 1 percent that's not quite
right, looms up enormously, rendering the entire effect somehow
creepy and monstrously alien."
http://www.allbookstores.com/book/4333010020
