Staring Back at You



A commissioned installation to FLASH 4 Biennale in Tampere, Finland.
The work reflects the theme of the Biennale, “New Darkness”, starting from the idea that knowledge has brought light to humanity. A reflective mass of Mylar spheres, surrounding the viewer, refers to artificial intelligence – large language models – and the content they generate. The language models function by mirroring, distorting and hallucinating averages. They do not understand what they “learn” but create copies that look outwardly like the so-called authentic content. They also learn from their own creations, with each new generation drifting further away from the original. Machines begin to create themselves.
The AI-generated mass threatens to drown out everything created by humans. Today, in autumn 2024, around 52% of all text on the internet will be generated. It is predicted that by 2025, 90% of all text, images and video on the internet will be generated by large language models. The light of knowledge that drew us out of the darkness will be lost in the near future in the light pollution of content “knowledge”
