I used Voyant Tools for this assignment paired with “A Modest Proposal” by Jonathan Swift. I read it a few years ago for an English class, and while not long, it is an excellent piece of satire. For those not familiar with it, “A Modest Proposal” presents a solution to the “issue” of unhoused children by suggesting that their parents sell them as food to the wealthy, thus benefiting society and ensuring all families have the money needed to provide for their children.
After putting the text into Voyant, I changed the settings and the results were as anticipated. The most used words were children, kingdom, and thousand. I looked at some of the other tools as well, including TexualArc and Bubbles. Overall, Voyant provided nothing I hadn’t already picked up from reading the work. It put numbers to what I already knew, but it didn’t give me any pertinent information.
More over, it distilled a wonderful piece of literature into graphs, lists, and data that objectively mean very little. Artificial Intelligence shows great promise in the fields of medicine, science, and mathematics, but attempting to apply what is computational system to art subtracts from both the helpful advances AI has made and from the humanity of art.
I next used the photograph to the right as found in the Carleton Digital Collections, colorized it using DeepAI, and put it into tools on Distant Viewing Explorer. Like with “A Modest Proposal”, I found the results underwhelming. The colorizer stripped away much of the history of the photograph by erasing its original presentation. The Distant Viewing Explorer added nothing my image, colored or original. As you can see below, the results were blatantly wrong.
When exploring AI and the potentials, the wrong question to ask is “what can it do?”. AI can now generate images and text, it can detect cancer, it can finish uncompleted musical scores, it can process data.
The more important, and more interesting, question is “why are we using it to do that and how does it benefit us?”. Why are we using AI to “create” art, writing, and music? Why are we using it for homework? For chores?
Why are we using a computer to do life?