Ask Portal

For better or for worse, I interface with AI a lot. This constant exposure made me experience firsthand both poles of our popular – self-contradictory – perception of AI: simultaneously the incredibly complex and all-knowing blackbox, yet also an utterly convenient and simple-to-use technology – just click a button for infinite results!

This winter, I participated in the School for Poetic Computation’s Machine Language class to untangle my thoughts. I encountered Wesley Goatley’s talk, “Demand No Automation”, which names the class of “art” done with AI – “I asked AI to… and this is what it created…” – as users “creating tech demos for algorithmic capitalism”.

I am intrigued by the entire class of activity done with AI with the act of asking at its epicenter.

Image from OpenAI. The act of asking is further shortcut'd with elegant UX.

From within the black box, can we question the act of asking AI for answers? What understanding can emerge from sitting with the banality, rather than significance, of this act?

Ask Portal is a machine of inconvenience. It borrows its form matter from familiar generative AI tools, from the rounded corners of its prompt input to the vast minimalism of its interface. The similarities end there: Ask Portal refuses all that generative AI offers.

[1] When the user types queries (into the literal black box), they are refused visibility into what they just typed, making it impossible to over-engineer their prompt.

[2] When queries are ‘asked’, the Portal offers no answers; instead its prompt box just grows. In doing so, the Ask Portal forces the user to sit with the significance of the act of asking.

At some point, the Portal offers you the dictionary definition of “ask”.

[3] The Portal offers front and center the option to ‘forget’ queries — something dubious and perhaps impossible with generative AI platforms.

[4] In this portal, your futile queries are the piece of technology that is being demo’d by the tech CEO archetype. 

Underlying this project is the urge to queer technology, by creating a piece of technology that is, from a conventional perspective, useless. By having zero value propositions, Ask Portal is positioned diametrically opposed to visions of productivity promised by generative AI.

What can we learn from a machine that insists on its futility, not utility? Ask the Portal here.