Review | Hong Kong artists use AI to write song lyrics, revive an art critic, paint and more in Beyond the Singularity exhibition
- AI went up against a painter, wrote intimate Cantopop lyrics and penned reviews in the style of late art critic Nigel Cameron in experimental Hong Kong show
- Interesting as it was, the exhibition showed singularity isn’t here yet, as machine learning models struggled to emulate humans – although one did get shirty
Little did I expect when I walked into the exhibition called “Beyond the Singularity” that I would encounter the eloquent ghost of Nigel Cameron.
Seven years after his death, the former art critic at the Post, who dominated English-language exhibition reviews in Hong Kong from the 1970s to the 1990s, is still opining on recent local exhibitions. I was horrified, naturally.
Wong and her team had manually inputted reams of Cameron’s reviews for the Post to an AI programme, creating machine learning algorithms that can be used to generate reviews written in his style.
I may be biased – nobody wants to be replaced by a machine pretending to be a dead man – but reading the reviews closely, there were telling signs that the writer had never been to the exhibitions.