Please click on the image above to play the animated gif.

For the Speculative Future task, I’ve created an animated gif using Photoshop. Originally, I was going to create a short film with a similar theme, but because I’m currently filming a documentary for the final project, I thought this would be an exciting technique to explore.

When viewing Dr. Shannon Vallor’s “Lessons from the AI Mirror”, I immediately thought of numerous conversations I’ve had with friends, who are quite suspicious and cynical about the future of AI. Dr. Shannon Vallor describes that some of these sensationalized perspectives include the idea of AI as a “Doomsday on a chip”. Although the lecture goes onto to explain a more “reasonable, informed perspective” of AI, I thought it would be fun to explore an idea that Hollywood has made so famous in films like Terminator, I, Robot, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the artificial intelligence generates it’s own consciousness and attempts to take over the world.

In my animated gif, I’ve presented a political figure (played by myself), addressing the media. The first set of frames depict a normal, relatable human being who is telling the audience to trust him. This is meant to depict the superficial, shallow, sometimes meaningless rhetoric that we observe on many of the media outlets, advertisements and political campaigns. The next set of frames represent a glitch “in the matrix”. Presenting a world where the skin has been peeled back to reveal the truth and expose our politician’s real identity, a robot, plugged into a system that tells him what to say and how to act.