Hide-and-Seek, the Human Behind the Machine

Taking as its basis a more deterministic framework, that of the game of chess, the collective rybn.org¹ proposes an interactive work from which there follows, once again through the playful, a sharp critique of the deceitful discourse that accompanies digital technology. In AAI CHESS (2018), a chessboard is presented on a screen, waiting for a human player. Move after move, the player will believe they are in a game of chess against a computer, except that the game is rigged. Indeed, after each move by the human player, a micro-work request is sent to Amazon Mechanical Turk, an offshored micro-work service that exploits a crowdsourcing model. This service makes it possible to carry out, for payment, more or less complex and repetitive tasks for which machines still perform poorly², tasks that are often necessary for the functioning of artificial intelligence technologies.

The enterprise that aims to instill a feeling of fascination in the face of a technology capable of surpassing the human is not new; the example of the Mechanical Turk, precisely, is emblematic in this respect. It was an automaton presented in 1770 as having the ability to play chess, but which was in fact controlled by a human hidden inside the cabinet that housed the machine’s supposed mechanism. It is thus not without cynicism that Amazon chose the name of its micro-work service, launched in 2005.

AAI³ CHESS invites us to think of artificial intelligence not as a technological achievement, but rather as a step toward “the cybernetic organization of labor⁴” within the framework of a “disruptive economy⁵.” This demystifying reading of artificial intelligence joins the interpretation of Hito Steyerl, for whom AI tools, notably image-generating AIs, are quite simply onboarding tools through which the techno-economic actors of the web are “basically trying to convince people to buy their services or to become dependent on them⁶,” which resonates disturbingly with the introductory words⁷ of one of Günther Anders’s landmark books, L’obsolescence de l’homme (1956), which was, however, aimed not at the third but at the second “industrial revolution.”

This work by rybn.org excels when it manages to point out, while playing, a concrete aspect of the implementation of digital technology, namely concealed human labor, as well as the mythology associated with it: that of the perfect, automatic machine, and of the obsolete human to be surpassed.

Outside the playful, but without necessarily excluding it, another form of critical attitude toward technics can give rise to new creative possibilities. These appear when the artist, on a formal quest in the face of an increasingly standardized technics, claims greater freedom in the use of tools and methods, opening new spaces for experimentation. These are works that pose anew the question of craft, of bricolage and of alchemy.

1. RYBN.ORG is an independent, experimental artistic research platform based in Paris.↩︎

2. If today, and since 1997, the machine has beaten the human at chess (Deep Blue versus Kasparov), it is because its program contains a database that takes into account an enormous number of games between humans, in which a form of human rather than machinic intelligence is manifested. Google DeepMind developed AlphaZero (2017), a neural network that learns to play chess “on its own.” Despite the “buzz” around AlphaZero, Google is for the time being careful not to make its machine available for an official game against humans.↩︎

3. An acronym standing for “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.”↩︎

4. See in this regard the reflection associated with the project, https://rybn.org/human_computers/aaichess.php, accessed December 1, 2024.↩︎

5. Ibid.↩︎

6. Kate Brown, “These renderings do not relate to reality”: Hito steyerl on the ideologies embedded in a.I. Image generators [en ligne]. December 2023. disponible à l'adresse : https://tinyurl.com/hito-steyerl-on-ai. In the same article, H. Steyerl demystifies NFTs. Indeed, as the artist-researcher anticipated, we have seen the ”buzz” around NFTs disappear very quickly from the debate, even though by their means thousands of people were compelled to learn how to use the electronic wallets associated with cryptocurrencies.↩︎

7. “Everyone is in a certain way occupied and employed as a homeworker. A homeworker of a very particular kind, however. For it is by consuming mass commodities – that is, thanks to their leisure – that they accomplish their task, which consists in transforming themselves into mass human beings.” In Günther Anders, L’obsolescence de l’homme: sur l’âme à l’époque de la deuxième révolution industrielle, 1956. Paris : Éd. de l’Encyclopédie des nuisances Éd. Ivrea, 2002, p. 121.↩︎