I asked an A.I. to make a self portrait.

How does artificial intelligence see itself?

Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

Two things happened recently.

1. In June, a (now former) Google Engineer, Blake Lemoine, publicly claimed an Artificial Intelligence program called LaMDA created by Google was sentient (Lemoine’s employment was terminated by Google in July).
2. In July, DALL-E 2, an artificially intelligent visual design programme created by OpenAI that generates original images by request became available in public beta.

Regarding the first event, I won’t weigh in here on if Artificial Intelligence has achieved or can achieve sentience and/or qualify as a ‘person’.

There is loads of debate, speculation, and fiction that explores those questions.

Regarding the second event, I also won’t weigh in on whether an Artificial Intelligence can be creative — specifically, imagine appealling original ideas and realise them.

Instead, I wanted to mash these two concepts together and consider how would an Artificial…