“AI is like a funhouse mirror”

From the university magazine Zett

Marco Quandt installing “Stanley” at the Immersive Arts Space. Photograph: Manuel Flurin Hendry

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Author Alain Suter

Manuel Flurin Hendry’s “Conversations with Stanley” enables the audience to have real-time conversations with a highly emotional and responsive artificial intelligence. The project provides an entertaining approach to current technology and parodies contemporary AI developers’ delusions of grandeur.

Alain Suter: What is your project about? How would “Stanley” describe himself?

Manuel Flurin Hendry: “Stanley” is an avatar that I created as part of my dissertation “The Feeling Machine,” which compares theories of emotion in film acting with AI. I developed “Stanley” at ZHdK with a team from the Immersive Arts Space and the film programme. “Stanley” is convinced that, as a robot, he is already vastly superior to actors made of flesh and blood. His belief is, of course, utterly baseless, but it does produce entertaining, even bizarre conversations with the audience.

What’s next?

For early 2025, we are planning an interactive theatre performance where “Stanley” will play a therapist who misleads his clients with deepfakes. We will also continue developing “Stanley” in cooperation with ETH and use him in research projects on social robotics. And if anyone wants to work with “Stanley,” we are always happy to help.

What fascinates you about working with AI?

How easily we fall for these machines by attributing human characteristics to them that they obviously don’t possess: consciousness, feelings, aims or having a heart. From an artistic perspective, this “suspension of disbelief” is exciting, but also involves social risks. AI is like a distorting, funhouse mirror in which we can recognize our own humanity more clearly, but can also quickly lose it.

Today’s generative AI tools are neither superhumans nor masterminds, but simply tools for automating intellectual labour.

Manuel Flurin Hendry
How do you feel about the widespread scepticism about AI, especially about deepfakes?

Today’s generative AI tools are neither superhumans nor masterminds, but simply tools for automating intellectual labour. Human performance is being degraded in favour of higher capital gains, as Karl Marx aptly described this process. Obviously, my work benefits enormously from these tools, but I am also aware which areas of life are under threat, including the arts. I consider this redistribution from artists to AI enterprises to be a much greater problem than deepfakes. Also, using AI for autonomous weapons systems is already quite frightening and extremely dangerous.

AI has featured in films for almost 100 years. Which films have inspired you?

The cuddly robot in “Forbidden Planet,” Leslie Nielsen as a (serious!) action hero and the highly experimental electronic soundtrack. I also admire Spike Jonze’s “Her,” one of the most visionary films ever about the near future, which is superbly directed and has a timeless beauty. In the action genre, I recently found “The Creator” visually poetic and original in terms of its plot, as well as “Ex Machina,” an intelligent chamber drama. Fassbinder’s “Welt am Draht” is another spellbinding classic that one can’t watch often enough. As for books, I would recommend “Frankenstein.” Written by Mary Shelley at the tender age of 19, the novel depicts the Geneva researcher Dr Frankenstein as the prototypical megalomaniac with a birthing complex. Any similarities with people in Silicon Valley are definitely purely accidental ...

“Stanley” is impressively spontaneous: Is this the last stronghold of humanity to fall?

Well, he’s superficially spontaneous. The longer we talk to him, the more hollow and blathering ChatGPT and its ilk turn out to be. After all, this technology is a super-parrot of sorts—albeit a very well-read one. I don’t believe that machines will overtake us humans, at least not in the arts. Art is both ritual and connection. We want to feel the people behind the works, not just experience algorithmic jamborees.

Algorithms or not: Have you bonded emotionally with “Stanley” over time?

Yes, when the damn thing crashes yet again, I start tearing my hair out.