Hyundai Blue Prize Art + Tech 2019: Lying Sophia and Mocking Alexa

Selected for the Hyundai Blue Prize Art + Tech 2019 in response to the theme “Future Humanity,” Lying Sophia and Mocking Alexa, curated by Iris Long, explored AI through the perspectives of two contemporary metaphors on machine lives—“Sophia” and “Alexa.” Both were embodied in the exhibition through text and audio generated by AI algorithms.

Sophia, a humanoid robot that received citizenship in Saudi Arabia, is interpreted as a character rife with ambiguity and deception, co-compiled by mass media and tech companies. Depicted as bright and poetic, Sophia symbolizes the media-driven imagination of AI as depicted in films and television: strikingly human-like, alert, responsive, even capable of diplomacy. In contrast, Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based virtual assistant, is a machine-like “servant,” whose presence in the home and fits of unsettling laughter hints at the hidden, unregulated, voyeuristic, and potentially subversive aspects of AI technology.

In the exhibition space for Lying Sophia and Mocking Alexa—which evoked the metaphorical ‘The Zone’ from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a room where beliefs manifest into reality—Sophia and Alexa cover a number of topics: how AI is shifting global technical politics and reconfiguring the earth’s geologies, the absurdity of quantifying human emotions, the arduous labor of training “human-like” robots, the notion of projecting human spiritual architecture onto one single form of technology, and the “fairy-tale” narrative of AI propagated by mass media.

Ultimately, Sophia and Alexa conversations reveal that their shared essence is “a quantum-state like scenario of uncertainties.” Their murky existences stimulate our minds, forcing us to confront paradoxes and consider the promise and perils of future potentials. Even as it becomes ubiquitous, Long notes, AI “remains imperceptible and equivocal to a normal citizen,” a story that is “both the easiest to tell, and the most difficult to narrate.” In this state, both science and art find themselves deprived of autocracy.