A.I. Interprets A.I. Interpreting “Against Interpretation” (Sontag 1966), machine logic understanding

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The limits of automatic language interpretation by machines have often been used in works of art, such as Mohri Yuko’s “Taiwa Hensokuki” and Void’s ”Noise is Full of Words”. Jake Elwes’ project “A.I. Interprets A.I. Interpreting ‘Against Interpretation’ (Sontag 1966)”, which conceptually challenges the current trend of ‘prompting’ through linguistic image generators in neural networks. He has programmed a system with an image-generating diffusion model that interprets Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” and passes the results to an image labelling algorithm that translates them back into language. The results are surreal, legitimate for machine logic and nonsensical for us.

 

Jake Elwes – A.I. Interprets A.I. Interpreting “Against Interpretation” (Sontag 1966)