Effort Sold Separately / Certainty Not Included (diptych)
Effort Sold Separately / Certainty Not Included (diptych)
Master Project
- MAIAD 26
People have not grown lazy. Asking a question once took effort, and the answer arrived with some doubt attached. Critical thinking lived in both, yet both were engineered away while the expectation that humans think critically stayed unchanged.
This two-part installation is about what interfaces remove. Each piece returns one thing that AI products have designed out: the effort of asking, and the doubt in the answer.
At Effort Sold Separately, the screen asks the visitor to share an unanswered question they are carrying. To type it, they face a deconstructed keyboard, so the act of typing becomes absurd. Then the twist: after all that effort, no answer is delivered.
At Certainty Not Included, the visitor chooses a prompt, written by a human or an LLM, and tests it against a white-labelled AI. Stripped of brand, no model can be judged trustworthy in advance. The confident tone of the reply stands exposed as a design decision, and the installation asks us to consider the role of human judgement when using AI products.
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