esantus

The PRAYER

The Prayer is an experimental set-up to explore the possibilities of an approximation to celestial and numinous entities by performing a potentially never-ending chain of religious routines and devotional attempts for communication through a self-learning software.

A concept by Diemut Strebe. “The Prayer” is probably the first robot that speaks and sings to God, all Gods. A rough design (inspired to a machine produced by Japanese scientists that replicates the human vocal tract) is combined with a cutting edge neural language model, fine tuned on thousands of prayers and religious books from all over the world. The prayer generates original prayers vocally articulated by Amazon Polly's Kendra voice, and sings religious lyrics to the Divine. The opera was realized thanks to the support of Regina Barzilay, Tianxao Shen, Enrico Santus, Bill and Will Sturgeon, Brian Kane, Matthew Azevedo and many others (full list of contributions can be found in the Official Website: https://theprayer.diemutstrebe.com/). The prayer is currently exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, France.

The Artistic Concept

How would a divine epiphany appear to an artificial intelligence? 

The Prayer using NLP tools of the OpenAI GPT2 model, fine-tuned on scared texts at MIT CSAIL, as well as AI based text to speech conversion in real time, explores the difference between humans and AI machines in the debate about mind and matter.

It reflects on the potentials and implications of deep learning AI within both its narrow, targeted setting and general state. The installation could touch on a (potential principal ) limitation of AI learning concerning any capacities of understanding its own results and the universe. Such a ( potential principal) lack would manifest most obviously and in particular in so called holistic cognitive activities like religious observance and the creation of art.

https://theprayer.diemutstrebe.com/

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