From Artificial Intelligence to Augmented Imagination. “An image is worth a thousand words, but a single word is worth infinite images.”
From Artificial Intelligence to Augmented Imagination. “An image is worth a thousand words, but a single word is worth infinite images.”
Credits: Andrea Filippi @afilippidesign & Gabriele Moschin @gabrielemoschin
From March 2023 until today, about a year and a half has passed, and Artificial Intelligence, as predicted by Max Tegmark in Life 3.0, has established itself - in the world and in Italy - as: “…the most important conversation of our time…”.
In the beginning, the story of AI would indeed be as long as History itself: already Plato describes a dialogue in which Socrates seeks an algorithm to distinguish piety from impiety…
Hobbes in De Corpore, Leibniz with CALCULEMUS! and then Descartes with his Homunculus in the “theater of the mind”; which is nothing more than the prequel to the (fascinating) Inside Out. But we could continue with the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, with Faust, Goethe’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Pinocchio, and then the great science fiction of Metropolis, R.U.R., Asimov, Dick, Clarke, Kubrick, Spielberg…
Reason as calculation, logic and science as faiths, the Prodigious Machine Man, hyper-rationality, functionalism, connectivism, the dark era of misplaced trust: namely the Enlightenment, with its glycemic peak reaching up to Positivism. These are the topoi of AI mythopoiesis. Up to self-transcendence, transhumanist philosophies (both right and left), the “if you can do it then you must do it” mantra and beyond, up to the Noosphere, the Singularity, the Omega Point, to Buzz Lightyear.
But let’s go back to March 13, a date when, partly for fun, partly out of curiosity, we published Poesie dalla Macchina Pensante. Liriche dell’AI on Amazon: 2 days to generate the lyrics, 7 to publish it and, immediately, an article in the May issue of Bella and AI by Vogue, aptly titled: “Let’s put it to the test.”
Credits: Andrea Filippi @afilippidesign & Gabriele Moschin @gabrielemoschin
And the test continues: with over 30,000 images that we have produced surfing the classic exponential curve of technological development, the one both Moore with his Law and Kurzweil with his “accelerating returns” have told us about.
And we are still accelerating: hyperrealism, hallucinations, Machine errors, algorithm limits, misunderstandings… there is a whole new multidimensional virtual space to explore!
And: no, the computer does not do everything, AI does not do everything. AI is a tool, like a brush. It is a co-author, like a brush. Because, as Heidegger suggested, there is no neutral technology. Every tool incorporates the work of previous people and, therefore, imposes its limits and grants its potential to those who decide to be artists or happen to be called such.
Credits: Andrea Filippi @afilippidesign & Gabriele Moschin @gabrielemoschin
We like to recall a remark by Dino Formaggio with a Duchampian flavour: “Art is everything that men call art.” Talking to a machine is no different from wrestling with a chisel. Prompting is the technique of learning to talk to computers.
And to those who say that an image is worth a thousand words, today we reply that a single word is worth infinite images. No wonder the words we possess are far fewer than the images we can think of possessing.
Credits: Andrea Filippi @afilippidesign & Gabriele Moschin @gabrielemoschin
Article by Andrea Filippi, AI Artist, @afilippidesign & Gabriele Moschin, AI Artist, @gabrielemoschin, as seen in The Jewellery TrendBook 2026+ by Trendvision Jewellery + Forecasting.
