Exploring the co-evolution of humans and AI through play

This project was made by game developer Tomo Kihara and design/art duo Playfool as part of the “Art Incubation Program 2023” an artist fellowship program of the Civic Creative Base Tokyo [CCBT]. Following the successful debut of the Deviation Game ver1.0 at CCBT, it has been showcased at Now Play This in London and Ars Electronica in Linz, receiving attention from outlets like The Guardian and IGN. The online playable version of the exhibit, titled outdraw.ai, is set to launch in spring 2024. The exhibition version can also be made available upon request.

Now that AI can effortlessly imitate, how will we deviate?

The rapid advancement in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), has resulted in AI being able to imitate many of the intellectual tasks that were once exclusive to humans, such as generating images and writing. This development has sparked a great deal of excitement but also considerable concern among artists who fear that their jobs may become obsolete. However, just as the rise of the first photographic machine in the early 19th century freed painters from realism and paved the way for the Impressionist movement represented by Monet and Van Gogh, history has shown us that whenever a new technology emerges that can replace human acts of expression, people have found ways to deviate and create unique forms of expression that cannot be replicated by that technology.

This pattern of imitation and deviation has been a driving force in the evolution of both technology and expression. Building on the Imitation Game (1950) by Alan Turing, often considered as the father of modern computer science, we propose a new type of “deviation game”, where the aim is to utilise AI not to imitate past expressions but to identify what has already been expressed, allowing one to deviate from it.