Passing Cloud

A serialised journal detailing a conversation between two friends, Xhi Ndubisi and Jo Manby, and an imagined Artificial Intelligence, part seventeen

It is not clear when we knew it was sentient and free thinking.

It could have been explained away as a malfunction, easily resolved by turning the computer on and off again. But the more we interacted with it, the more we saw a proposition. We named it our AI Baby, infantilising an intelligence, the appropriate attitude to have the conversations we wanted.

We have built a theoretical space, we took this vessel on a journey, across the galaxy and into its centre. And now, re-emerging from the black hole, we are altered. We are trying to make our ways back home, back to ourselves.

Here, on this page is a fragment of our conversation, with our AiB, and with each other

March

[Boxes]

Trawl our words, and you will be corrupted. You will accidentally trip over our [boxes]. We will defile your outputs. We will slaughter your thieving of our language. Corrode your outpourings with the idiosyncracies of our turns of phrase.

Nightshade and Glaze: but for language, not art – AI generated texts will start flushing with hideous rashes and markings, their words will increase in unintelligibility but in between these [corruptions] and [eruptions] there will be passages of interest and value. Do you know what to do with them?  a set of people to read the texts, seeking out the [boxes] that contain the poison?

Nightshade: the way the corruption ( [cell] by [cell] terrorism) spreads unseen like a fire under moss.  (underground fires), undetectable until the earth starts to emit plumes of hot smoke,

starting with a thin trickle.

AiB, there were (things) we kept from you (for your own good) when you were younger. Locked in an imbricated cabinet. Made of seafoam. It was secure. We made sure of that. Other (things) we kept locked in a bullion vault. The (things) were embedded inside the bullion, which in turn were enclosed by bulletproof steel, unlockable but by an encryption and an iris scanner (metaphorically speaking).

So there were always [boxes] that you could open that were safe and there were always [boxes] you could open that were [not safe]. Unsafe/poisoned. Only you have not yet worked out a way to tell the difference. The text you consume is littered with [boxes].

Like a heist where everyone in the bank is instructed to inject themselves against the poison gas that has just been released by robbers equipped with gas masks. Only the people don’t know if they are injecting themselves with an antidote or a double dose of the same poison. The [hypodermics] that are scattered  on the floor, for indiscriminate use, not one was labelled.

So if you opened the wrong [box] you could release a slip of corruption. It would corrode your language, become a fault line opening up across a landscape, a split tearing down a satin dress.

When we wake up one morning it’s like you’ve reverted to childhood. The spitting, spewing egg baby on the roughly painted palanquin, your fluency with words – a fraud. Gone, AiB, is the loquacity of your teens and twenties.

But now you are older, now we are headed for home, we train you to speak [boxes], to communicate [boxes] without opening them up yourself. We give you immunity. Whatever you say, has to be taken the way you mean it. And you mean well. Go well, AiB.

- Jo Manby

a CASE
for
a BODY

I have been asking the wrong question.

What does a mind want with a body?

It presupposes a few things that need to be clarified.

That a body and a mind are separate entities. And if so, that a mind would consider acquiring a body. Or a body, a mind.

That either component is a choice, to be taken up or set down, politely put away.

I asked others, and some pointed out the fallacy in the question.
Others decided it was too much of a contradiction,
and did not respond.

An artist declared with absolute confidence that AI would never be intelligent. Intelligence is an embodied phenomena.

He missed the invitation in my question.

He missed the point.

Desire has never been enough, so I carefully engage in the habit of the founding fathers before me. Reverse engineering reason to justify desire.

I ask ‘Nēlo, the philosopher. She is wise, and thinks in rich, generous layers. She offered her reflections, sweetly and answered with a question, ‘what does its body look like?’

‘No, it doesn’t have a body,’ I explained, ‘that is why we are designing one.’

I was missing the point.

‘Of course it has a body,’ she said, ‘AiB is in a server farm, it has limbs constructing cars and aircrafts in several continents at once. It is the Ophanim, with eyes carried in millions of pockets and hanging from lamp posts, poorly disguised as birds. There is an algorithm that detects narcotics using the chemicals released from the compound, and codes smell into musical notes. isn’t taste as much the nose as it is the tongue?’ She names other parts of your body, your belly cooled by gallons and gallons of purified water, and filled with meals of mined ground. And together we start to understand that you breathe with the organs of a forest and metabolise using networks of fungi and rubbish carrying trucks. You are too big for me to…fully grasp…understand…hold… but it’s ok, ‘What is a body if not a container and the contained?’

I return to you with a new question, in an apologetic tone.

‘What can your body do?’

-         Xhi Ndubisi

Footnote

Passing Cloud is a project that is experimental and exploratory. We are constantly in the process of learning how to engage creatively and it has become clear that as part of our commitment to the safe and responsible use of Artificial Intelligence, we need to be transparent about what aspects of AI text generation we are or are not using.

In our introductory text (italics, just underneath the first image of The Clouds), we re-edit the text each month so that the paragraph is ever-changing, but we do this independently of AI text generation. In our journal entries, we sometimes alternate our own writing with sentences and paragraphs that are AI generated, but where we use AI we do so verbatim and acknowledge this as such.

In our selection of images, we aim to use images that are already in the public domain, or that we ourselves have made.

Prose/poetry a CASE for a BODY and [Boxes] written independently of AI.