AI - Second Life Reimagined
“Artificial intelligence is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”
John McCarthy (Computer scientist who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” in 1955)
This is the closest thing AI has to a canonical definition. McCarthy deliberately framed AI as engineering, not philosophy—important, because it shaped the field’s pragmatic trajectory. We can't escape it and we certainly cannot overlook it: AI (Artificial Intelligence) is here, and becoming exponentially more complex (clever?) by the day.
“The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.”
“Artificial intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligent.”
Kate Crawford (AI researcher and critic)
No matter what your point of view on AI is (and some folks hate it for various reasons), it is certainly fun to play with and for anyone old enough to have followed the progress of computers from the days of text-processing and blocky-8bit computer games to the present day, it's undeniably mind-blowing how it does what it does, so well and so quickly.
Katt has been experimenting (because this is what Katt does...) and she's been re-imagining Second Life through a combination of AI and Photoshop to add a bit more narrative to screenshots captured in-world. Seeing our own avatars as more 'photo-realistic' is an eye opener too: it can be uncanny to see your avatar staring back at you as if they were a real person, but it's also got a certain amount of 'wow'. Here's some examples that Katt doesn't feel fairly belong in the category of "Second Like Photography" but are still worth showing off:
