Audrey Kim’s dog Murphy uses a combination of head nods and 10 buttons on the ground to communicate, she says, and has a habit of making friends with crows. She taught him to use the buttons because she believes consciousness is a spectrum and intelligence is mysterious. Those tenets also led her to become curator of the Misalignment Museum, a temporary exhibition about the future of artificial intelligence that opens today in San Francisco, ground zero for recent excitement about generative AI and chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The Misalignment Museum imagines a future in which AI starts to take the route mapped out in countless science fiction films—becoming self aware and setting about killing off humanity. Fortunately, in Kim’s vision the algorithms self-correct and stop short of killing all people. Her museum, packed with artistic allegories about AI and art made with AI assistance, is presented as a memorial of humankind’s future near-miss with extinction.
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