Simulation and Hallucination: what comes after art?

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence-based technology has allowed machine learning models to insert themselves into practically all forms of sociocultural relation and production. With their deep historical links to neuroscience, these brain-inspired models have demonstrated an uncanny ability to simulate what were previously thought of as singular human faculties such as language, image production and, in some sense, abstract reasoning.

As with a human brain, these artificial intelligence models are also able to hallucinate, and it is within this hallucination surface that a series of collaborative projects, developed in the context of digital therapeutics research in the Champaliamaud Centre for the Unknown, was born.

In this discussion, neuroscientists Zachary Mainen and Gonçalo Guiomar, together with artist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, come together to discuss how their work fits in the interstices of their fields of practice and in what ways these objects have influenced their research.