MACHINE WHISPERS
Pip Thornton (Geosciences/EFI) & Evan Morgan (Design Informatics)
Scottish Storytelling Centre, Storytelling Court – Friday 22nd – Sunday 24th November 2024
Stemming from the WWAI workshops and from discussions with Beth and Emma at the Push The Boat Out Poetry Festival, MACHINE WHISPERS is a brand new interactive installation exploring how poetic language is affected when fed through a series of AI and other machine translation tools. Users feed a piece of poetry into a custom-built application and send it through a series of languages and tools to see how the words and meaning change. A ‘dissimilarity score’ gauge indicates how dissimilar the machine judges the current translation to be from the original text. Challenge yourself to get a high dissimilarity score, or challenge a friend to guess the original poem from your final translation.
The work will be an engaging and ‘fun’ way to discuss very current issues around human skill/creativity and the fate of the translating industry in the age of AI, while also sounding a more serious alarm about the real world dangers these translation tools can have, in particular when used by/for immigration or law enforcement, for the translation of medical records, and also issues around breaches of confidentiality in translating sensitive or secret documents.
Users can choose from a selection of 90 first lines of poetry which can then be fed through a series of languages (alive, dead and imaginary) using Google Translate, Facebook Translate, and ChatGPT.
More details at https://pushtheboatout.org/events/machine-whispers/
Can we trust machines with poetry? Will an ‘artificially intelligent’ translator mangle carefully crafted verse, or make it more beautiful? And will a human still recognise a poem when it’s passed through multiple translation tools? Machine Whispers is an interactive installation designed to provoke debate around translation and the role of the human translator in the age of AI. Come and test the mettle of the machine!
Machine Whispers was created by Dr Pip Thornton, a Chancellor’s Fellow in Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, and Evan Morgan, a research software engineer in the Institute for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
Supported by Design Informatics and Edinburgh Futures Institute