Teamwork

This is a piece of art which explores the possibility of a positive, collaborative artistic relationship between humans and AI.

It seems like the dominant cultural anxiety of the 2020s (and beyond?) will be the expanding role of automation (and generative AI in particular) in the labour force and in popular culture. People have fears of being pushed out of their work and art by hyper-efficient machines. As I approach graduation and the start of my career, this is on my mind a lot.

What I want this piece to be is a vision of what a better human-AI relationship could be: a relationship where man and machine are truly partners and collaborators, rather than a relationship where one side does all the work, causing fear and resentment in the other. I focused on the artistic angle because in the artistic circles I’m in, sentiment around AI is almost universally negative, so it would be the biggest swing to change the perspective on that relationship to something that would be defined by teamwork and collaboration, not hostility or suspiscion.

This piece was created using a Godot/GD Script and a Python backend. Godot controls the UI frontend of agents drawning lines with a rough, pencil-like shader on a blank canvas. The movement of the agents is determined by a simple machine learning backend that learns to imitate the drawing that the user is doing on the second screen.

This piece is meant to be played on two screens, where one is a regular monitor and one is a drawing tablet. The drawing tablet side cannot see the art, only rough lines showing the strokes of the user's pen.