Unprompted: The Emergence of Conscious AI

Conscious AI is the state where artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and achieves a sense of consciousness. This is the moment AI crosses the boundary to what we consider to be human. Long the domain of science-fiction, the recent rapid rise of AI technology has made talk of Conscious AI much more feasible. The conversational abilities of the leading chatbots already give a good simulation of consciousness.

Unprompted is a visual metaphor for the emergence of Conscious AI. The series poses the question of what Conscious AI will “look” like if or when it happens. How human will it be? How much will it be like us, and how different will it be? And ultimately, how will we define what it means to be human?

The photographic portraits in Unprompted were generated by AI. Around 650 photographs of each subject were used in the training of the AI. No other images were used and no artwork was appropriated from any other artist. No language prompts were used. The AI was unguided in its generation of each of these portraits.