Genesis: The Creation of an Artificial Earth
Genesis: The Creation of an Artificial Earth / 2019
The work Genesis: The Creation of an Artificial Earth (2019) is about a fictional story of creation. During this eight-minute video, the audience will see a world arise from a single-celled organism. This organism, generated by machine learning, moves through its own latent space. Searching for a world similar to ours.
Unlike most StyleGAN videos that consist of smooth interpolations, this work shows a kind of uncertainty of the trained model. The model moves both forward and backwards, as if it is looking back at the latent space that it creates.
The AI-generated imagination of a world is accompanied by an uncanny voice, which is generated by machine learning as well. This voice tells a creation story as we may know it, however one thing is different: everything is created by an AI.
The source of this video is determined by the very first sentence of the Bible, converted into an image. From there, the Style-GAN takes over, searching for a landscape similar to its training data. The work shows the struggling of the AI, which has been commissioned to turn a single-celled organism into a world that we assume as real.
As we give more and more tasks to machine learning, will an AI’s image of the world be the same as we know it today? When technology becomes so advanced that it is able to create its own reality, it may be possible that this reality will resemble ours. However, when human input is no longer required, the world of machine learning may become incomprehensible. Perhaps an abstract world parallel to ours.
