Eli by Peter - Edition #6

Eli by Peter #6 - ‘You will never believe these bizarre truth behind musical instruments'

India is an utterly fascinating and confusing country. Eli has once described it as a journey back in time, back to the middle-ages. Even after visiting the country six times, he still has a hard time wrapping his head around it. It is beautiful and wild, generous, and cruel at the same time. Watching Slumdog Millionaire is probably as close as you can get without going there.

What would a computer ‘see’ if it looked at images from India? Our world is changing rapidly, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gradually nearing human capacities. In You Will Never Believe These Bizarre Truth Behind Musical Instruments, we wondered if the neural learning networks of computers can help us understand our world, in this case, India.

For the book, we have selected 100 images. Most of them are gritty and contrasty black-and-white. All 100 photos were automatically ‘tagged’ by an Artificial Intelligence program; the computer analyzed the image and automatically assigned keywords. This AI ‘interpretation’ of the computer was taken to the next step. We asked AI to ‘write’ a story based on the assigned keywords using the best available AI writing software on the consumer market. Finally, AI also created the book's title based on the 50 most frequent tags given to the photos.

We did not control or alter the keywording or the writing of the texts and apologize in advance if keywording or texts might offend anyone. The combined keywording and AI content creation is blasé in some instances and fascinating in others.

Has AI given us a better understanding of this inexplicable country?