youandai website

youandai is an interactive installation that encourages the interested to participate and make a poem together with a neural network. It is inevitable that our biological limitations will be lifted in the future by technological progress. Our brains are expanded with functionalities and cognitive skills that were unthinkable 10 years ago. The impact and ethical consequences thereof are hardly understood. You and AI is a project that, through the cooperation between computer and human, between author and author, raises the question about the future of artificial intelligence and technology in our lives.

youandai only creates unique and original poems. It will grab the first sentence from out of a huge databass filled with all day everyday poems. Different centuries and from amateur to professional poets. And after that it will write its own poem, filled with words and sentences from the database. But, if you interact with the system it will replace the first sentence with the words you gave him through the microphone. All poems are never made before.

If there is nobody interacting with the system, the machine will come up with a new poem every 1 minute. All poems are provided with a time and date stamp. And every poem is numbered. So there is an accessable insight in the learning curve of the neural network, because you can easily put them side by side.

If you feel creative, always wanted to write your own poem and never found the right way to start. youandai will help you. If the button on the left lights up, press the button and make your first poetic line of creativeness. The machine will automatically turns it in the first sentence and will write and append the rest of the poem for you. And there you have it, you first creative collaboration between human and machine.

What does this mean for the future of creativity? People want to grow, we want to improve our functionality and transcend our biological limitations. An appropriate way to do this is to "expand" our brain through physical and virtual databases, calculators, and other technologies that drastically improve our cognitive skills. This wish has probably manifested itself much earlier in technologies such as religion: gods who are omniscient, give us strength, can answer our questions. Perhaps our social tendencies also want to give a face to the current "techno religion": instead of just using our tools, we also want to personalize them, talk to them. In order to make this connection with our technology, we need to find and make agreements, and thus make the external human.