Ask Everything: A Social AI Art Experiment in Data Surrender

What happens if we willingly hand over our deepest, most random thoughts just to see what the machine thinks of us?

Welcome to my latest wacky project, Ask Everything. It is an experimental social AI artwork &, admittedly, a privacy advocate’s worst fucking nightmare.

We start with a database of 800+ random questions for you to answer. You log in, & you just start answering. Any kind of question. All kinds. You can skip the boring ones, vote shitty questions down to oblivion, and even submit your own into the void.

But the questions are just the raw material. The actual art is what the machine does with them...

At the top of your profile page sits a living, shifting, analytical biography of you, written by AI. Every time you answer another question, feed it another data point, you can ask the AI to re-analyze your entire answer history, & it rewrites your portrait. It tries to offer insightful biographical info & personal advice based on the breadcrumbs you leave it. It’s whimsical, it’s mostly positive, and it can be addictive to watch it evolve the more data you expose to it, & the more earnest you are in your answers.

Soon, you will be able to export slick little images of your answers to share on social media, or you can stay on the site and wander through the profiles of your friends to read their answers and see how the AI has psychoanalyzed them.

Since your answers will inevitably contain a wealth of personal information, I have done my best to keep your data secured to the site, & provide you with simple controls over visibility. Profiles are strictly private by default. You can make choose to make them semi-public, sharing your analysis & answers with everyone who is logged into the site. You can also choose to only share your profile with your friends/mutuals; your profile is only visible to users who follow you & you follow back.

Ask Everything is still a work in progress, but I am just too excited to share it to wait any longer. It’s unfinished. It’s raw. But if you want to fall down the rabbit hole & see your digital reflection with me, the experiment is live.

Come feed the machine: askeverything.app