Allison Parrish’s presentation, especially her phonetic similarity transcriptions produced really interesting results! I can see sci-fi movies like Star Wars creating new languages with the desired sound for different species with this technology. Friends could send each other ridiculous-sounding text messages to be decoded with a special word.
I’d also be interested in how AI could visualize words given their phonetic properties as we saw with the visuals for bouba and kiki. This could form a symbolic language for the sci-fi species. There doesn’t really need to be an initial reason to form these tools beyond some aesthetic interest. Moreover, I’m interested to see the unintended uses of Parrish’s new phonetically vectorized database and other tools like these developed for purely aesthetic purposes.
Favoring Ge’s principles for designing AI systems, Parrish’s tool for phonetically transforming text may be extended to have some sort of slider to change the degree to which the original text is phonetically altered, like the semantic transformation tool used in the Frankenstein Genesis example. Granularity and valuing human agency seem to go hand in hand. With this example, granularity in what percentage of each text is included in the resulting mixed text allowed Allison to use her taste to select the passages along the way that would be of most interest to other humans. This also results in infinitely more combinations to choose from than a simple 50/50 generation red-button tool; when it comes to aesthetic pieces like poetry or paintings which involve judgment, there can’t really be the notion of a “perfect” algorithm, so having more options to choose from would naturally seem better than just one. Most tools like these also require human judgment in choosing inputs of interest for the system to process. Even in the case of the phonetic red-button tool, by choosing the Robert Frost poem and the silly word choice by which to shift the poem, the result is clearly the result of human creativity, merely using a tool to produce the desired/imagined effect/result.
I’ve really enjoyed the thought-provoking readings and the chances to express reactions and ideas with these reading responses. Thank you for such a stimulating philosophical side to this course to go along with the coding aspect- quite Symsysy- honestly, this class should really be cross-listed as a Symsys course too!