Catherine M. Weir

‘A small, stout bird with a short, thick bill… perfect for cracking seeds.’

Machines describe sparrows to me is a responsive digital artwork derived from my larger, ongoing project Unreported Sightings: a series of AI-generated photographic images created using a custom style transfer model and descriptions of common British birds from various field guides as prompts for the system. For this installation in the Annex Gallery, I have chosen to focus on a collection of images of ‘House Sparrows’ generated from a field guide-style description written by ChatGPT.

The House Sparrow is one of Britain’s most common birds and a daily sight along the hedgerows of Garnethill. However, viewers are unlikely to recognise many of the depicted birds as ‘House Sparrows’; and their attention is instead drawn to the unstable relationship between words and images that lies at the very heart of many of today’s generative AI systems.

James Bridle, Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence (2022), London: Allen Lane.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019), New York and London: Melville House Books.