¹ The video is currently screening in the old Observatory of Leiden as part of the exhibition Plants and Planets that combines science and artworks.

² Stochastic Parrot︎︎︎ is a metaphor coined in a famous paper that describes that the large language models used in AI generating do not understand the meaning of the language they process.

³ This video is based on the work Cosmotheoros  by Christiaan Huygens︎︎︎.

Cosmotheoros is a visionary text on possible life on other planets written in 1698 by the great Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, also considered as the first science-fiction book in history.
For the exhibition Planten en Planeten (Plants and Planets) in the Hortus Botanicus and old observatory in Leiden – curated by Meta Knol and Frans Snik – I created a fictional documentary inspired by the Dutch translation of this book by Daphne Stam (courtesy of uitgeverij boom).

With the imaginative power of the technique of AI video generating I brought to life my archive of cut out imagery on popular-scientific topics, such as stones and minerals, plants, animals, space travel, art, medical science and marine life. Using Large Language Models, in a famous paper referred to as Stochastic Parrots, AI confabulated movement and change of shape over time in these old images I offered it.

The result presents intrinsically powerful but in essence still unintelligent techniques hallucinating on intelligent life in the universe, underlining the paradigm of space and time: it is impossible to accurately visualize the future before it becomes the ‘now’ in space-time, but in hindsight it always seems to originate from history as we know it.