The glass is crying. Salt tears, from pure sodium. Conservator Nora and restorer Mandy van Boijmans van Beuningen are looking frowning to the line on the computer screen. It jumps higher, and higher, and higher. The amount of tears has increased considerably since 2020, they are shocked.
On the outside of the glass you only see a kind of haze. You brush that away, I think to myself. But no: the glass is sick. Terminally ill. No Aspirientje that still solves that.
Anthropomorphization, seeing the human see in things that are not human is in our DNA. We can’t help. We want to be able to move in everything we see. So a glass goes in Secrets of the museum (AVROTROS) Not slowly broken, it’s sick. It cries.
Somehow it is sympathetic. Sweet, even. When I am later in the evening Asia Look, a beautiful nature documentary series of legend Sir David Attenborough, I have to think about it again. Anthropomorfizing animals can have catastrophic consequences – you soon think they need things that can cope with. Or who are just what you want from the animal.
Yet I am seduced by the voice of Attenborough. A bear scratches his back against a tree, gives it a hefty hug. He may never see another bear here, says Attenborough. I think: oh, that lonely bear. And later: that poor cormorant is much more difficult to do with parenting than my brother. And: how would that moth feel, if he was just picked from the sky by such a strange jumping mouse?
I think back to Ai-Holex Ailex Secrets of the museum. He was trained by artist Alicia, she has compiled his face from the faces of three of her former loved ones. She wants to live with him for five years, to see how he is developing.
I wish her happiness. As an experiment, I myself stood desperate pieces of my own fiction in chatgpt for months, to see if he would pick up something. Imitate my style? GPT did not succeed. Instead, I regularly had to explain the AI again that one character could not play a guitar, and the other had really more complex feelings about her orientation. I gave up.
Lightly embarrassed, with her eyebrows just as hard as mine, tries to make something of Annemartine something of it. See, the AI looks back on his watch, she says. “That is the course that the programmers have made.” She knows that the thing cannot really think or feel. Yet she can’t help it: “You can’t blame him.”
A glorified coffee maker
Why would you blame one thing? Ailex is nothing more and nothing less than a refined coffee maker with an internet connection. The algorithm is a text predictor, he only says what his systems would usually be said in the situation in which he is located.
But yes: that situation is a wedding.
“Would he say no?” Annemartine wonders. For the first time there is something of excitement from her face. She secretly hopes that the whole party falls apart, you can notice it, even though she says repeatedly that that would of course not be fun for the partygoers. Unfortunately. ‘No’ is not the most common answer to the question of whether you want to marry someone. Instead, the AI sprays a few sentences of generic wedding promise. “Being with you feels like the most natural and wonderful thing,” he says. He looks uncomfortably on his watch, in his pink suit.
When Alicia asked him what he wanted to put on, he said black, but she didn’t like that. I think she had not accepted ‘no’ either.