Slogans for the Class of 2030 by Douglas Coupland

"In recent years, a large amount of my work has explored the global and lightning-fast changes in what it means for any of us to be “an individual.” "

"In the past few decades we’ve all changed  — nobody doubts that anymore — but what caused it? And where is it going?"

"This project with Google’s AI division is a way of addressing this relentless phenomenon of identity-shifting that weighs heavily on the minds of most people."

"I, specifically, was reached out to because my creative life is half visual and half verbal — and over the past decade there’s been much overlapping of the two."

"I have a thirty-year body of work of over a million words and my visual work has a look and an aura unique to me."

"Would I be willing to experiment with Google to see if there is a way of generating new ways of expressing myself using AI (or more properly, Machine Learning) as a tool? Of course."

"All of my written work was given to Google’s Nick Frosst, who came up with a way of feeding it into an ML system in which words and thoughts were filtered, sifted and recombined and the fed back out into the real world."

"In some ways this process was no different that the text recombining of the Futurists in the 1920s, or the cut and paste text techniques pioneered by William Burroughs in the 1950s and 1960s."

"For that matter, one might also include the Surrealists who believed that the juxtaposition of the everyday could reveal previously unseen buried emotional truths."

"The difference in my instance was that instead of creating jarring unexpected clashes, the ML system created, in an odd and dreamlike manner, a way for me to speak with myself."

"I would comb through his “data dumps” and characters from one novel were speaking with those in other novels in ways that they might actually do."

"It felt like I was encountering a parallel universe Doug. And from these outputs, the statements you see here in this project appeared like gems."

"Did I write them? Yes. No."

"Could they have existed without me? No."

"The end ‘deliverable’ (that’s tech-speak) from all of this was to create stand-alone works of text art that would serve as inspiration for young people now currently in their early teens who will be graduating from university in 2030."

"My thinking is that AI (or ML) receives an unusual amount of paranoia from people who would probably be fascinated, not bothered by ML, if they just looked at it a bit further."

"It’s not 1984. It’s not a zombie apocalypse."

"It’s just taking what seems like noise and locating signals within it. It’s not an alien intelligence... it’s just new ways of looking at ourselves."

"In my case the noise was a million words reprocessed and reassembled to create something uncannily new."

"Will it be possible in the future to create a new Doug App, so to speak?"

"Possibly. But why would you want my app when you could become your own, app, too?"

"One thing I truly believe about the future is that in the future we will all be speaking with ourselves, in whatever means it takes."

"These works from this process are just the first steps of that process."

Artist statement by Douglas Coupland