Video about the art installation

The Spirit Machine is an art installation that uses artificial intelligence to generate quotes as if they were from Maria Montessori. The piece consists of a continuous stream of quotes inspired by Montessori’s work and was created by AI artist Jeroen van der Most and myself to celebrate the opening of Radboud University’s new Maria Montessori building. The AI system utilized in the project is GPT-3, the most advanced text-generation AI available today. As a large language model, it is based on an extensive amount of textual data including billions of texts from the internet and libraries containing books with discussions of Montessori’s work. This allows the system to understand patterns and structures in texts and generate new texts of exceptional quality in the style of Montessori.

For the art project, GPT-3 was implemented in multiple pipelines that enhance the relevance and inspiration of the generated quotes while also implementing de-biasing, ensuring the novelty of the texts, filtering sensitive content, and presenting the output using artificially intelligent design. The final quotes are displayed on a four-meter wide screen with an experimental design that combines elements of the past and present.

A unique aspect of the design is that the AI makes design decisions based on its understanding of the content being displayed. GPT-3 estimates the most important words in the texts by examining example sentences in which a human has indicated the most important words. The AI system then highlights the important words with a different color and adjusts the speed of the animation with which the words are shown, incorporating pauses after important words in an attempt to make the display of computer-generated texts more accessible and natural, like human speech or thought.

The artwork is displayed in the Maria Montessori building on the Radboud University campus. Our work was also exhibited at the 2021’s Dutch Design Week.