TAMPA – Can a machine think like you? Learn like you? Paint your portrait like Picasso?
Visitors at Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry will soon be able to find out with the Sept. 6 opening of “Artificial Intelligence: Your Mind & The Machine.”
The interactive, traveling exhibit explores the effects of artificial intelligence.
Forget the killer robots of science fiction. This is about the everyday technology shaping how people live, work and learn. With games, smart machines and hands-on challenges, it shows how AI works and how it learns to “think” like a human, without getting lost in computer jargon and techno-talk.
“AI might sound mysterious, but at MOSI, we break it down to the basics, so anyone, at any age, can grasp how it works and what it can do in the future,” said John Graydon Smith, president and CEO of MOSI. “It’s already in your pocket, your home and your job, whether you realize it or not. This exhibit makes it fun to see how machines learn, sometimes even better than we do, and why that matters. You’ll leave with a whole new perspective.”
Guests will be immersed in a futuristic playground filled with activities for all ages. Train an AI to recognize your face. Paint a selfie in the style of Van Gogh or Picasso. Press a few keys and hear a piano compose new music using the sounds of 1,400 instruments. Take on stacking puzzles that challenge you to learn like an AI system does.
“Our goal is to give every visitor an introduction to AI that helps them understand what the technology will mean to them,” said HP Newquist, the AI historian and author who created the exhibit. “Kids are certain to work with AI in the years to come, from self-driving cars to digital personal assistants that will help them with their homework. Adults are already trying to make sense of it.”
Exhibit highlights
- Giant Simon game: A huge version of the classic handheld electronic game that challenges you to remember and repeat a pattern of colors and sounds.
- Spot the fake: Compare real photos to AI-generated ones and see if human eyes can still tell the difference.
- AI at the movies: Explore how AI is used in films for everything from creating lifelike special effects to bringing digital characters to life.
- Voice mimic: Record a short message and let the AI recreate it in different voices or accents.
- Guess that object: Show the AI different items and see if it can correctly identify them or hilariously miss the mark.
- Cat vs. Not Cat: Try the AI’s original “training” game based on thousands of internet cat photos, then test if it can spot a cat in unusual places.
- Talk to a translator: Type a sentence and watch as AI instantly translates it into multiple languages. See which ones sound closest to the original meaning.
- Pattern detective: Give the AI clues and watch it solve mysteries by finding patterns in huge sets of data faster than any human could.
On the web: mosi.org