What A Ghost Dreams Of

What dreams does AI have?

What is a “ghost”? Throughout history, humanity has lived in a changing world, encountering new and incomprehensible phenomena with a mixture of fear and awe. But what does the “ghost” mean in today’s world? A new “ghost” lurks in the Ars Electronica Center within our digital surveillance society. The dream of the “ghost” in our time is to have its own unique face.

A large eye watches visitors as they enter the main gallery. As each visitor steps inside, their presence is captured by a computer vision AI algorithm, assimilating them into the “ghost.” From their facial sample, the “ghost” generates a series of faces of people who do not exist. In the end, an AI-selected self-portrait is rendered as a black-and-white photograph, based on the most unique face generated from the process.

This project uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), an AI algorithm that learns through competition between two neural networks: a generator and a discriminator. The reference model is an open-source initiative called thispersondoesnotexist.com, launched by Philip Wang, which generates faces of people who have never existed.

With the development of AI technologies, what do we, as humans, project onto our AI counterparts, and how do we coexist with them? AI learns about our world without prior knowledge, generating data that has never existed before. If Man Ray used photographic technology to develop new artistic techniques, what are the implications of using AI in the creation of art? Who owns the copyright of such creations? And what does the “ghost” dream of?

The installation What a Ghost Dreams Of raises questions about the meaning of humanity by observing the dreams of AI. In this duality of the 21st century, where humans and AI coexist, what do we, as humans, dream of?