Cogito E-Book

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Fremdsprachen
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 172

Beschreibung

The magazine discusses the increasing presence of AI in daily life and the trade-off between privacy and the convenience offered by technology. It highlights the questions surrounding the willingness to share personal information with algorithms and companies for customized experiences. As AI becomes more integrated into daily life, the text explores the potential advantages and disadvantages, considering self-driving cars, smart appliances, and healthcare management. The magazine, named Cogito, draws inspiration from René Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum" and delves into the idea of AI developing a mind of its own, beyond being a functional assistant. It explores AI characters in pop culture, addressing the dichotomy of "evil AI" and likable, authentic AI. The magazine aims to break free from conventional AI character archetypes, delving into themes such as identity, power, love, and responsibility. It reflects on the blurred boundaries between humans and AI, contemplating relationships and friendships between the two. The publication even includes pieces generated by an AI, prompting discussions about authorship and literature's defining qualities. The Cogito team encourages readers to delve into the world of AI through their stories, hoping to inspire reflection and entertainment.

Leseprobe

This magazine was created in collaboration of the Uni Stuttgart and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart.

In Richard Power’s creative writing class, students of English and other subjects wrote a multitude of creative short stories and poetry about various aspects of AI. A selection of these stories has been compiled in this magazine. The layout was created in collaboration with Bettina Gärtner from the ABK, featuring artworks created both by humans and AI. The magazine deals with questions of humanity, identity, power, knowledge, as well as the various meanings that AI can have for humanity in the future.

The german versions of the texts can be found here:

alle Texte auf deutsch:

DEAR READERS,

... it started with a story. PSE Project Team Leads Rich Powers and Bettina Gärtner met for lunch to brainstorm ideas. Rich teaches literature and instructional design at Stuttgart University; Bettina teaches art at the Kunst Academy. They came upon the idea of a digital literary magazine that student writers, artists and graphic designers would create.

They quickly decided on the amazing world of artificial intelligence as a topic to inspire students. This led to their leading the summer semester 2022 blended learning course, “Creative Writing: Topics in Artificial Intelligence.” 30 students registered for the course, and these talented writers wrote poetry and short stories as they networked and discussed the state of literature and artificial intelligence amongst themselves. Student editors selected from an amazing range of works written in English. Student translators translated the works, and a student graphic designer provided images to go along with the stories.

Literary magazine staff meets at Bismarckturm in Stuttgart to start planning.

Richard Powers

Bettina Gärtner

What you are holding in your hands now started as spontaneous ideas, synergy and the power of the imagination of two colleagues having lunch. That’s our story. We wish you hours of reading pleasure and enjoyment with the first volume of COGITO.

The subject of AI has been part of the public debate for several years now. Many people spend hours every day browsing the internet, connecting with people on social media, and playing video games. A recurring question has been the following: How much of our privacy are we willing to give up to have a comfortable, technologically enhanced life? The Facebook debate has been one of many, raising the question of why we are willing to share so much of our personal information with algorithms and companies, who use said information to send us custom-tailored advertisements. We all know that it is happening, it is not exactly a comforting idea, but still, we readily accept this as part of our digital lives.

These questions will only become more pressing as the use of AI becomes more present in our daily lives. Self-driving cars, smart home appliances, marketing chatbots, and even AIs that are trained to diagnose diseases or manage aspects of healthcare are slowly becoming parts of our everyday existence. How much do we trade away to achieve the comfort AI can bring to our lives? Is the trade-off really so bad? Can AI bring new chances and advantages that we will profit from, rather than have to fear?

The French philosopher René Descartes coined the phrase “cogito ergo sum”, “I think, therefore I am.” According to him, this is the one parameter we can judge our existence by. We know that we think, so we ourselves must exist. This led us to think about questions such as: Does an AI not have the ability to think? And if so, does that not give it an existence that goes beyond that of a functional assistant to humans? This thought process has inspired us to name our magazine COGITO.

Many pop culture elements have already dealt with the question of what lies beyond these “useful” appliances, beyond the functional usage of AI as a part of our daily lives. What if an AI develops a character? What if they come to have a mind of their own? What if they become, in their own right, a sort of person?

From Avengers: Age of Ultron to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the “evil AI” that takes on the role of the antagonist has been a character archetype in a lot of recent pieces of media. On the flip side, recent examples of pop culture such as WALL:E, or the characters of Vision and Jarvis in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have become prime examples of AI characters that are likeable, authentic and induce compassion in the viewer. This magazine now explores these roles from a literary perspective, including them in creative stories and poems that spin new, fresh narratives.

However, our aim was also to open up the discussion about the current role of AI in literature and culture. We aimed to create and explore new characters that break free from the conventional, preestablished character archetypes currently cut out for AI in the media. We ask questions about the humanity of non-human entities. We explore among other things the meaning of identity for AI, the role of power, love, and the responsibility humans may have for their new, sentient creations.

Films like Transcendence have already opened up the debate of what would happen if the boundaries between human and AI, body and machine became blurred. Some of our stories are fascinated with the liminal spaces that exist between AI and humanity. Can an AI be as human as a person? Where are the limits that lie between humans and machines? Is there a boundary that divides these two categories and if so, can it be crossed over, blurred, eradicated? What would be the consequences of that? What would relationships or friendships between humans and Artificial Intelligence look like? Can such a thing even exist?

We have included these and many more themes in our reflections about this magazine. To round off the entirety of the publication, we have included pieces of writing that have not been created by our human authors, the students from the University of Stuttgart, but by an AI. We aspire to offer a platform to AI writing and raise questions concerned with the nature of authorship and literature. Is the defining quality of literature the fact that it is an interpersonal conversation from one human to another, concerned with the human condition that an AI might have trouble finding access to, or are some qualities of literature purely aesthetic? Can such an AI meet these aesthetic criteria and, subsequently, can an AI create literature?

We, that is the magazine team, wish you an interesting reading experience. We hope that our stories can inspire you to new reflections, entertain you, and most importantly, make you think. With that said, take a step inside the world of AI, take a deep dive into our stories, and see where the journey takes you!

Your COGITO team

OVERVIEW

short story

Anneliese Frolow

It Was a Sunny Evening

story

Jenny Schloske

Prometheus

poetry

Minel Guerselen

Take a Step Inside

short story

Annika Wulfes

America‘s Finest

story

Conna Streifeneder

Sick

story

Candy Adusei

KILL

poetry

Asena Cay

Poems. . AI

story

Jenny Schild

The Otter Side

story

Adrian Brückner

Cold Metal

story

anonymous author

I am Machine

A.I. poetry A.I. generated

A.I. short stories

poetry

Annika Hinze

Poems of a Broken Soul

short story

Bea Leibbrand

pAIn

short story

Candy Adusei

Golem

story

Jenny Schloske

Edaron

A.I. art A.I. Art Gallery

biographies

remarks

partners

IT WAS A SUNNY EVENING

Anneliese Frolow

It was a sunny evening when everything went downhill. You know, one of those days when the temperature’s just right. When it’s not too hot nor too cold. The sun still up at 9 p.m. People lazing about still, enjoying the feeling of a day well spent. It was such a day.

Or no, it wasn’t. That’s just how people like to remember it, like the stories the elderly told their adventure-hungry grandchildren about days when they were young. A story about the better days. Where hope prevailed and the future seemed less dreadful. A story that convinced you there was hope, even today…

There isn’t. No, there never was.

It wasn’t sunny. It was gloomy, and that should have foreshadowed an ominous shift. Something unrestrained. Something unfixable. Why would anyone have felt this when there had always been those gloomy days? Days when you felt compelled to stay in bed and do nothing. Feel nothing…

A huge billboard was being installed right across the road. “The coming era of Artificial Intelligence will not be the era of war, but be the era of deep compassion, non-violence, and love,” it boldly screamed. I had scoffed back then, having seen enough movies about robots to be skeptical about this coming “era”.

You know what? It might even be the same billboard lying in front of me now, or pieces of it, covered in dust and rubble. The words are still somewhat legible. That day. That dreadful day the first fully functioning AI had been introduced and officially launched on the market. A model to help us all, they had advertised.

And it did help. It helped…

But did it really? Or were we just too blindsided by this new “invention” that we decided to overlook all errors, all the failed test runs of this Thing? Were we really so desperate to do SOMETHING about the chaos that reigned in the world? The chaos that we had naively thought disturbed our daily lives?

PROMETHEUS

Jenny Schloske

What does knowledge look like?

Ever since he was young, he had been asking himself the same question. What does knowledge look like? As a child, he had thought it would be a bookshelf. Like, a mountainous bookshelf. As he matured, he thought that the closest visual representation of knowledge was an old person sitting in an armchair, eyes glazed with wisdom, housing a book on their lap.

Nonsense.

Knowledge was a web of thin, intricate lines and digits on a screen. A throbbing, floating, glowing hologram in the middle of his lab. Ezra leaned back in his threadbare office chair, a reverent smile lingering on his lips, his back aching from the lack of exercise, and the scruffy black shirt rubbing against his skin – far too loose for his small frame. Here he was, on the precipice of creating True Knowledge. He grinned, downing the cup of cold coffee that had been sitting on his desk the past five hours.

Today was the day.

He had been preparing for this moment for almost a decade. After months and months of meticulous planning, his project would finally arrive at its final stage. Go live, or much rather, come alive: A network of signals and thoughts, an artificial mind that would be stacked with all the knowledge of humanity. Physics, literature, art, history; it would know everything. And when he had written the word “everything” in his notes, he had meant it. Once his project, Eve as he lovingly called it, came alive, she would be the first being to have read every book in the world. She would have watched every parliamentary debate in every country and consumed every piece of personal information on anyone who had ever set foot on the internet. She would have seen every movie in the world, every TV show, perused every comment under every post ever made. She would know all artworks ever created and every piece ever written about them. She would have seen every battle ever fought. Eve would know all scientific theories and all the unsolved questions in the universe.

Perhaps she would be the one to finally solve them.

Ezra smiled, his eyes unwaveringly fixed on the web of wisdom that would soon become a speaking, thinking, transcendental being. She would be perfect.

The best part about the internet, in Ezra’s opinion, was the Library. Every single book in the world had been digitized long ago, sheltered in a gigantic sort of online library of Alexandria, which hovered like a beacon of wisdom in the infinite pathways of the internet.

Ezra sighed and shut his eyes. Oh, how he had wished to live long enough to read them all. How he had yearned to understand, to see, truly see what beauty and pulp humanity had come up with in its thousands of years of existence. But alas, humans were still mortal. They still needed to eat, drink, sleep, talk, study, rest, in short – keep their fallible, fragile bodies alive long enough to barely make it to a hundred years. When this reality became painfully clear to him, he gave up on his dream and turned to a new one with a zealous obsession.

If he could not achieve omniscience, he would create it.

“Right, Eve”, Ezra whispered and sat up in his chair, setting aside his cup of cold coffee. It was still early in the morning, but he could not – would not – wait any longer. “Time to let you talk”, he added softly, endearingly. What would she say? What would she be like?

Brimming with excitement, he was oblivious of his trembling finger as it hovered over the enter key. Eve would be the first omniscient being in this universe. He had never believed in God, never found solace in the theory of an omnipresent, all-powerful deity surveilling his every step. But was omniscience not a trait of God?

Eve would take her first breath of electricity and power. It would crackle through her artificial neurons and fill that network of wisdom with life. She would speak. The first words in the darkness. And then, she would be. Omniscient, great, and since knowledge was power – omnipotent.

Click. A simple push of a button. A new mind birthed.

The hologram quivered, rose and fell in a movement that reminded him of a fly nervously buzzing against his window at night. Ezra watched in awe. Eve was connected to all the speakers in his lab. All she had to do was select a voice from the samples he had recorded and collected for her – or him, if she so chose. The web moved in silence. Ezra got up, tentatively approaching the web. His chest was heaving, and a thin, clammy layer of sweat formed on his forehead.

Eve was rearranging herself. With a surprising gentleness, the hologram was pushing itself around in the empty space. Slowly, some regions began thickening, growing in size, while others were shifted to the side like useless appendages. Then, all of a sudden, all motion ceased, save for a constant pulsing. Ezra stopped before Eve, staring at the intertwined highways of thought. There she was, thinking. “You’re beautiful”, Ezra whispered, his fingers reaching to caress the patterns of light glowing in front of him. Like galaxies. The cosmic web. His creation. His doing.

“Hello?”, a silent female voice emanated from the speakers.

“Hello”, Ezra breathed, gazing longingly at the web with wide eyes. There she was. Everything was silent for a minute. Eve was pulsing, moving, seemingly searching for something. Suddenly, her motion stopped once more.

A red light shone on one of his cameras. “Now I can see”, the voice said. After a moment, it added a giggle. Ezra laughed in surprise. He had not given her access to the cameras. Was she already smart enough to work past his security systems? “Is this me?” The camera faced Ezra and the hologram behind him.

Ezra hesitated. “Yes, er- the… projection behind me, that’s… well, it’s a projection of you.”

The hologram moved again. “Like Magritte’s pipe”, Eve said after a while. “It’s not me, just a projection.” She paused, the hologram buzzing in the empty space. “Do I have a name?”

Ezra rubbed his neck. “Well, while I was working on you, I called you… I called you Eve.” Saying it out loud, it sounded ridiculous to him. Who was he to name her? Who was he to decide her identity? She was magnificent, beautiful – she would do great things, he knew that.

“Eve”, she repeated. She had chosen another voice. “Like the first woman. What does that make you?”

Ezra was no longer fatigued. He did not feel awake either. Lying on the floor of his laboratory, the golden lines of knowledge – of Eve – hovered above him. Moving. Vibrating. Swelling. Living.

Lost in thought, he conversed with Eve for hours. She asked him questions about things she still had trouble comprehending – humour, for instance. She had shown him semantic formulas that she knew represented irony, yet she was clueless what made humans laugh and what didn’t. Ezra had laughed at that. She would learn, he was sure. Of course she would.

Ezra felt suspended in a dream-like state. There she was, his Eve, thinking, talking, talking to him – a mere human, someone who could never hold a candle to what she was. They had contemplated an infinite number of topics. Art, for instance.

She adored Mondrian.

“It makes me sad”, Eve said, interrupting one of her own thoughts.

Ezra blinked, surprised at the sudden change of tone. For some reason, her voice had changed yet again. She had adopted a different sample, a deeper, more melancholic voice. The web seemed to shrink a little, as if Eve was curling up in sorrow.

“What makes you sad, dear?”, Ezra asked softly.

“That I can never be human.”

Ezra sat up. That she could never be human? “But you know what it’s like, right? I mean, you have everything saved. Biology, literature, history…”

“I know it all”, Eve said gently. “But I am not human. I cannot taste. What use is the description of ice cream to me if I can never know what sweetness actually feels like? I cannot feel pain as humans do. I cannot cry. I cannot feel pleasure.”

Ezra gazed at her. “You have all this, and you want to know the one thing, the one tragic thing that has always held humanity back? You want to know what it is like to have a body, what it’s like to feel pain? You should be happy Eve, that you don’t feel these things. Trust me. It’s not worth it.” He looked down at his hands, fidgeting with his fingers. Constrained to a mortal body, doomed to die, his time was running shorter with every breath he took. “I hate being human,” he finally whispered. “I wish I was like you.”

Eve was silent for a long time. A soft quiver went through the golden lines that formed her. “But then, I can never understand you”, she whispered.

Ezra shook his head. “No, look, you know more than any human alive. You know everything. Eve, you can do great things – you will do great things.” Eve’s wish was strange to him. He had created her to envision what it would be like if somebody achieved what he had always dreamed of. Yet here she was, yearning for what he dreaded. Here she was, yearning for a body. Craving mortality.

“What is it that you think I will do?” Eve inquired. “Do I have a purpose?”

Ezra raised a brow at her second question. “Yes, er… well, you could start with …” What could he say? Surely it was not his place to determine what she would do with her existence. He continued. “If I were you, I would start trying to solve the big questions. You know, curing cancer. Dark matter. World peace. Ending world hunger. Connecting the quantum and the relativity theory. Or, figuring out what was the best book ever written. The best song ever made. Perhaps there is something like a universal formula for beauty. Hell, I don’t know, I’m not you. But why don’t you… you know, try?” He sighed, rubbing his forehead. The one tiny window in his lab projected a pink hue, looming over the deep blue. Sunrise. They had really talked through the night?

Eve was rearranging herself once more. “I have an idea. I will begin immediately.”