Mechanical Sight
About the Project
I created nine images with one shape and three colors. I fed these into a program I built to retrieve “embeddings” from OpenAI, the machine- readable output of the image — what the machine ‘sees’. The image is printed on top of the embedding. Double vision.
When you and I look at an image, we feel all sorts of things. AI systems see math — incredibly impressive math. These machines can articulate an image’s essential differential quality, reducing its essence to a string of numbers that point to a specific coordinate on a vast map.
The human experience — the interior reality of living as a person — is not well documented. Our memories are not in the training data. AIs don’t know what it feels like to fall in love.
Mechanical Sight asks you to ponder the implications of this gap between us and the thinking machines.
