Tasker (2024)
Tasker, 2024, Rod Dickinson & Sarah Selby
8mins Single channel video (live action and 3d animation) interactive chess pieces and board, UR5 Robot arm, table and chair, vitrines with IBM adverts
Synopsis:
Tasker is an automated interactive chess board, robot arm, and video.Gallery visitors are invited to play chess moves on a wooden, tournament style chess board closely modelled on the set that Garry Kasparov played against IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997.
Their opponent is a robot arm that responds to their moves, making moves, taking pieces, much like a human player.
Tasker, Technical prototype video, CVPR AI Art Gallery, Seattle, US, June 2024
Whilst the gallery player may think they are playing a chess AI system, in fact after each of their moves the chess system posts a task or HIT (Human Intelligence Task) on the Amazon remote labour platform mTurk.
The resulting move, executed by the robot arm, has been chosen by a remote mTurk worker.
Tasker, Technical prototype video, CVPR AI Art Gallery, Seattle, US, June 2024
A screen in the installation shows the mTurk dashboard and task process (above).
Tasker seeks to highlight the collective and collaborative intelligences behind artificial intelligence and its emergent qualities. It explores the globalised distribution of labour that underpins many machine learning ‘AI’ systems and the ethical issues that arise from this.
Credits:
A project by Sarah Selby and Rod Dickinson (based on an earlier prototype 'Deep Blue Fake')
Advice / thanks to:
Dr Hooman Samani (Creative Computing Institute, UAL)
Dr Claire Reddleman (The University of Manchester)
Robotics:
Rohit Ramesh Thampy (Creative Computing Institute, UAL)
Lieven van Velthovan (Creative Computing Institute, UAL)
Electronic Chess board:
Certabo