Machine Hearted by Ivona Tau

Machine-hearted series explore the complex umbrella of what feels intuitive to humans yet is challenging to interpret or analyze for machines & algorithms. In scientific research, there are usually only 7 emotions (happy, sad, angry, neutral, scared ...). Still, it’s difficult for us to imagine feeling only one kind of emotion with our entire essence. Emotion, the most primitive part of human essence, is also surprisingly difficult to analyze for machines. The AI systems still struggle with emotion classification even though they have established ground-breaking success elsewhere. This project is an artist’s attempt to explore the large AI model’s strengths and shortcomings in expressing complex human emotions in visual form. The data it was trained on has many biases and stereotyped emotional expressions, but can it also capture some more nuanced human feelings?