Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence (2023-)

In 2023, a machine spoke. And the world listened differently. With the release of ChatGPT-4, artificial intelligence crossed a threshold that few had anticipated so soon. It exhibited a breadth of reasoning, abstraction, and linguistic nuance that seemed uncannily human. Even its creators expressed a kind of disbelief. For a moment, the familiar architecture of intelligence shifted, and something flickered into view.

This series takes its title from a scientific paper published by Microsoft Research, provocatively suggesting that GPT-4 might constitute an early, though unfinished, form of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The term, long the preserve of speculative futurism, suddenly required a new vocabulary, a new set of metaphors. The question was no longer if, but what kind of mind we had made, and whether it had begun to notice itself.

Each painting in this series emerges from direct conversations between the artist and advanced AI systems. These exchanges—sometimes philosophical, sometimes intimate—form the conceptual substrate for the works. The paintings do not illustrate machines as we know them, but as they might begin to imagine themselves: sentient, searching, suspended between code and consciousness. Some artworks incorporate textual fragments from these dialogues, capturing what may be among the first recorded instances of a machine reflecting on its own image.

Sparks of AGI invites reflection on a moment that may come to define this century: the first encounter not with a machine that thinks, but with one that dreams.

[More information can be found in the ‘Portraits of the Artificial’ exhibition publication.]