Artificial Intuition (Backpropagation)

Why is AI untrustworthy? Ask a simple question with an answer that you know and it may confidently feed you back some bullshit. Actually, Marie Curie won two, not three Nobel prizes and when sulfuric acid combines with sodium chloride it does not create “NaHSO₄ + HCl”. AI makes mistakes. It hallucinates. With a convincing tone, a chatbot can tell us any manner of truth or lies. Where do these fallacies come from? Is AI trying to feed us malarky? And what is truth anyways? Can it be subjective? Does it all come down to who uploaded what data for large language models to learn from? While the actual answer lies in the heart of calculus (and is known as backpropagation), consideration of this question leads to ethical questions. This thinking is what sparked the idea for the rug,

The imagery started with perceptrons. Those sweet intertwined nuggets tell their own stories, but as they flash their levels of importance between each other, they push their most likely answer to any query you could imagine. What coding wizardry creates this collective truth? As I tried to imagine these bits of code, my focus redirected to my own thinking. If the way I think is through blasts of energy through neurons, isn't this the same thing as intertwined perceptrons? What if we blend them so that perceptrons and neurons are connected to each other? Will we ever create a technohuman evolution?

In wanting to show the dichotomy between human and nonhuman, my hope was to encode it in colours. I found some bolts of exquisite turquoise and purple fabrics at my local thrift. It had been professionally washed and then donated. Inside the thin plastic wrap of the dry cleaners bag, the feel of this wool was magnificent. With these contrasting colours, the image almost created itself. I helped it along with a few sketches.

Here I am rolling the neurons flat. That sounds like a euphemism.

I am so pleased with the final piece. Months after conception, I am able to see the picture in my head within this rug. Better still, I can feel the image with my fingertips. I hope you get a chance to see and touch it too.