23 Jan ODL Fellow Sandra Rodriguez and Alum Cindy Bishop To Premiere “Chomsky vs. Chomsky” at 2020 Sundance Film Festival

January 23rd, 2020

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere – from the photo enhancer in your smartphone to Alexa, the virtual assistant in your kitchen. But what is AI? Aside from the constant promises and expectations for the future, what does it mean to try to emulate human intelligence?

Sandra Rodriguez, ODL Fellow and creator and producer of “Chomsky vs. Chomsky”

OpenDocLab Fellow and MIT Visiting Scholar Sandra Rodriguez is the creator of Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter, a 10-minute prologue to a VR experience produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Schnellebuntebilder, and EyeSteelFilm, that lifts the curtain on machine intelligence  and lets you peek inside. This project, which was incubated and researched at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, is premiering at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival – New Frontier from January 23rd to February 2nd, 2020.

The AI gold rush is steadily gaining ground in health care, business, education, and almost every facet of our lives. But as big companies race to build machines that promise to “think like humans,” the technology itself remains opaque, hyped up and mythologized. We think we know AI, but it feels out of reach. This project aims to raise AI literacy by reminding us of its potential and limitations, all while reminding us of what’s special about human intelligence. 

Chomsky vs. Chomsky aims to provide a playful and introspective interaction. Guided by no other than CHOMSKY_AI, our virtual host built from digital traces of Noam Chomsky, we’re invited to think about the quest for AI – what we’re told it can do, and perhaps most important, what we want it to be. 

Cindy Bishop, ODL alum and back-end lead of “Chomsky vs. Chomsky”

Noam Chomsky is a man who wears many hats: linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, social critic and political activist. With tens of thousands of videos, pictures and recordings on the Internet, he is one of the most digitized living intellectuals. But Chomsky has also devoted his entire life to understanding the human mind, making him a perfect case-study and…perfect guide for this journey.

Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter  is directed by Sandra Rodriguez, and produced by the NFB, Schnellebuntebilder and EyeSteelFilm. Michael Burk from Schnellebuntebilder and Kling Klang Klong share the visual and sound design credit. OpenDocLab Alum Cindy Bishop from MIT Media Lab serves as technology lead and Guillaume Petitclair and Olivier Blais from MOOV.AI (a company based in Montreal) as the AI leads. The project was incubated and researched at the MIT Open Documentary Lab.

Technology and User Experience

Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter is an immersive experience.

In designing it, the team used different AI systems, which were inspired by the tools we use in everyday life. One such example is a simple chatbot, which allows you to “talk” to the AI system using speech-to-text technology. The reverse technology is used to allow CHOMSKY_AI to respond, combined with deepfake voice creation. There is also a tool for intent analysis (LUIS), which allows the system to get an idea of what you’re asking about – whether it’s a question, a joke, or what subject it’s about. The team also designed a more complex conversational AI system (BERT), which learns and becomes more sophisticated  as more information is fed to it. This is a system under development, and users help train it. 

Using a VR headset, audiences will be free to ask questions, interact, engage and speak with Chomsky_AI following the common conventions of conversation. As in any real conversation, visitors may choose to move on to different subjects, while Chomsky_AI prefers to finish his thoughts on the current one. While the conversation is free to go in any direction, it is still guided. Built from the arsenal of existing online material, the project demonstrates that no matter what we want to believe, all AI systems are still very much structured.

While Noam Chomsky was informed of the project, this experience was created strictly from existing material found online. In fact, one of the things that makes this so interesting is that Chomsky himself would likely disagree with the idea of being turned into an AI experience. While this provides for much irony, it also ensures the project will stay true to its goal, as the material used critically assesses the way we, as a society, seem obsessed with using digital traces to emulate the human mind. 

The user experience with this project is driven by conversation, so sound plays a crucial role. In speaking to Chomsky AI, voice is integrated as an input into the system. Words used and the tonality affects the virtual world. 

Chomsky vs Chomsky: First Encounter, is a prologue – a conversation starter. It was created using 4V (or vvvv), a platform that enables quick prototyping and developing. It’s a toolkit that enables general applications of real-time video synthesis and programming, allowing for the creation of an environment that can be used in VR. It facilitates the intersection of strong storytelling with interactive and real-time data flow analysis, as well as the visual programming of audio and video.