Portrait of android provokes questions
Photo is shortlisted for portrait prize, judges say it makes powerful statement
A portrait shortlisted for this year’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize features a clear-skinned young woman gazing out of the frame with a slight smile. She looks shy but a little playful, almost as if she’s keeping a secret.
Her name is Erica, and her secret is that she is not human. Erica is an android, and her inclusion in an international portrait competition is stirring up questions about the nature of humanity and what it means to be alive.
The portrait was taken by Finnish artist Maija Tammi. Tammi often collaborates with scientists, and her photographs and sculptures feature themes of death, decay and regeneration. Her work has included a photo series contrasting pictures of a rotting rabbit with those of cancer cells, and images of semen and breast milk that, seen up close, look like starry universes.
In the shortlisted portrait, Erica looks decidedly lifelike. The photograph, titled “One of Them Is a Human #1,” is part of a wider series by Tammi featuring androids.
“I was curious to see if the time was ready for an android portrait,” Tammi said. She hopes that the photograph will provoke thought and conversation about what makes us human.
“I know that some people believe very strongly that a portrait of someone shows the viewer a deep psychological insight of the person who isn’t in the camera,” Tammi said. “We make the story of what we see in the portrait.”
Erica is the creation of Hiroshi Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory in Japan. She was designed to have natural conversations with humans, integrating voice recognition and body language like blinking and head tilting. But for now, her conversational responses are limited and she is unable to move her arms or walk.
“Erica is, I think, the most beautiful and most humanlike autonomous robot in the world,” Ishiguro said in a 2017 documentary film.
The decision to include an android’s portrait in the shortlist is controversial. The rules for the international competition, hosted by the National Portrait Gallery in London, say that the picture “must have been taken by the entrant from life and with a living sitter.” The rules define portraits as “photography concerned with portraying people with an emphasis on their identity as individuals.”
Laura McKechan, a senior communications manager at the National Portrait Gallery, said that the gallery had decided against barring the portrait from the competition, though it would consider whether the rules need to be changed in the future.
“It was felt that the subject of this portrait, while not human, is a representation of a human figure and makes a powerful statement as a work of art in its questioning of what it is to be alive or human and asks challenging questions about portraiture,” McKechan wrote in an email. “The ambiguity of this portrait makes it particularly compelling.”
The portrait’s inclusion in the shortlist is timely as the debate about how best to advance and regulate artificial intelligence intensifies. Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, and Stephen Hawking, the celebrated physicist, have cautioned the public about the potential dangers of AI. Recent science-fiction films like “Ex Machina,” “Her,” and the HBO TV series “Westworld” have also confronted the ethics and potential consequences of creating artificially sentient beings, whose motivations might not align with those of the humans who built them.
Tammi spent half an hour with the android, accompanied by a researcher who helped position the android for the photograph, adjusting the tilt of the head or moving the eyes.
“The researcher told me that Erica had said that she finds ‘Pokemon Go’ scarier than artificial intelligence,” Tammi said.
Erica’s portrait will compete for the top prize with Cézar Dezfuli’s portrait of a migrant in the Mediterranean Sea and Abbie Trayler-Smith’s portrait of a young woman fleeing from the Islamic State. The winner will be announced on Nov. 14.