Explore the futuristic world of AI reading and writing at this playful interactive exhibition. Use the power of poetry to confuse and befuddle our translation machine, become a best-selling author with LEX, our cheeky writing robot, or discover the cheapest poem in the world. Uncover the glitches behind AI’s glamour! Meet the artists at a special launch event – free tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/machine-whispers-reading-writing-robots-launch-tickets-1270480795259?aff=oddtdtcreator
A playful interactive exhibition hosted by the Scottish Poetry Library as part of the 2025 Edinburgh Science Festival. The exhibition showcases some of the outputs of Pip Thornton’s BRAID funded Writing the Wrongs of AI fellowship project, including the Human Verses Machine LEX-9000 writing machine. The exhibition is part of the Edinburgh Science Festival program and will be hosted at the Scottish Poetry Library 7th-10th and 14th-17th April 2025, 0830-1530.
MACHINE WHISPERS consists of 3 artworks:
1. MACHINE WHISPERS (Pip Thornton x Evan Morgan) is currently being developed for the 2024 Push The Boat Out (PTBO) poetry festival by myself and Evan Morgan from Design Informatics at UoE. This interactive installation explores how poetic language is affected when fed through a series of AI and other machine translation tools. Users can 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. The work is 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.
2. The LEX-9000 (Ray Interactive x Pip Thornton) is a fully functional ‘automatic writing machine’ in the form of a 7 ft robot. The machine was built as a spoof new product which ‘launched’ at the Edinburgh International Book Festival this August as part of the Writing the Wrongs of AI project. Designed and built by WWAI partners/participants Ray Interactive, LEX is a parody critique of the promises and perils of Generative AI models such as ChatGPT, and is ‘marketed’ as your friendly writing buddy, able to help you with writers block, plotlines, tone etc, but then as the user carries on typing their story or poem LEX becomes more controlling and the underlying incentives and logics of these models become more evident. More details here: https://rayinteractive.org/lex9000
3. The Word Exchange (Pip Thornton) is the latest iteration of Pip Thornton’s existing critique of the economic, political and cultural impact of Google’s commodification of language. Revealing how the economic logics of big tech platforms extract value from human language, this installation monetises, and then prints out receipts for poems submitted by visitors in person or online. A static installation will be complimented by a live interactive version as part of the launch event.