“Smart Hans” won the main jury prize of Augsburg’s renowned media arts festival Lab30. The jury consisting of Julia Holzmann, Andreas Muxel, Stefanie Sixt, Martin Spengler, and Karin Zwack highlighted the scientific rigor and social relevance as well as the intuitive accessibility of the interactive artwork.

 

“Smart Hans” is the artificially intelligent reincarnation of Clever Hans, the “mind-reading” horse that lived 100 years ago. The interactive installation shows an animated horse that can guess any number on your mind in real-time via posture recognition. This installation is fun to play with, but it is also a warning about public surveillance and automated decision making. Furthermore, the artwork is a literal manifestation of the Clever-Hans-Effect, which describes the core flaw of any AI model – the general impossibility to fully determine, on which data its decision was based.

 

 

 

During the four days of the Lab30 festival, “Smart Hans” was allowed to guess the number on the visitors’ minds more than 700 times. With a total amount of almost 200 correct guesses, our current AI model is performing significantly above chance. We are looking for partners to further train our models to hopefully reach an accuracy of 70 – 80 % like the original Clever Hans.

 

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Team: Anja Borowicz Richardson (UK), Bruce Gilchrist (UK), Akshita Gupta (IND), Max Haarich (Artistic Lead / DE), Martina Huynh (NL), Asad Imtiaz (PAK), Muhammad Qasim Khan (PAK), Adrian Ludwig (DE), Pekka Ollikainen (FI), Raphael Pickl (DE)

 

Project Smart Hans was incubated during the Deepfake Masterclass at Baltan Laboratories  in Eindhoven (NL) under guidance of Ellen Pearlman (US) and Julien Deswaef (NL) from ThoughtWorks Art  as well as Leif Czakai (NL) from Baltan Laboratories. The project won the “Super Artistic AI Award” in the category “Interaction” and the jury’s main prize at Lab30 festival 2022.

 

Gefördert durch die Beauftragte der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien.