Ever wondered if Artificial Intelligence has a face? Here are some AI self-portraits

It's been quite the year for digital art as we continue to see extraordinary AI-generated images, such as DALL-E, popping up everywhere. Type anything random into the system, and it will develop a photograph, illustration or painting, responding to your typed brief. Want to see a cyberpunk illustration of a teddy bear playing video games in Times Square? No problem. Or chuckle at the Cookie Monster looking disturbed as it watches its cookie stock melt? It's not an issue. DALL-E, and other such programmes, will deliver the goods within less than 30 seconds, all based on what you type.

But although this technology is incredible, if not a little disturbing, there has been some speculation around whether AI has become self-aware. And that only adds to the mystery around what firms like OpenAI have created. With this in mind, New York-based creative director and artist Michael Hess wanted to explore whether this was true by launching an art project with a difference. Using generative neural networks – in this case, VQGAN and CLIP – he asked AI to reveal itself with this simple text input: 'Show me your face'.

"I wanted to find out how self-aware an entity is that plays major roles in our lives, and what that looks like," he explains."We think AI just follows a simple algorithm without reflecting on its own existence but is that really the case?"

The outcome was a collection of 100 AI self-portraits that make us wonder whether Artificial Intelligence is conscious, self-aware, and capable of responding to such a text input. What do you think? You can view all the artworks at michael-hess.com.