Featured Image Credit: hybridcouples / Instagram / Anna Blazhuk
If you're going to marry something created by AI, it's probably a saving grace if you're doing it as performance art.
Spanish artist Alicia Framis is apparently hoping to become the world's first person to marry an AI-generated hologram later this year - all for a piece of performance art.
Framis is an artist with a history of similar experiments, having once lived with a mannequin called Pierre as an exploration of love and partnership, but she's gone futuristic for her latest campaign.
Her fiance is called AiLex, and on Framis' Instagram profile (@hybridcouples) you can see a selection of videos apparently showcasing her life with her digital partner.
There are questions to ask here, though - for one thing, although hologram tech does exist, it's prohibitively expensive and impractical, so it would seem that that Frami's hologram is imposed in video editing - rather than AiLex actually being present in her home.
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On top of that, while Framis talks about AI and how it's going to impact on our quest to find love and life partners, the hologram in the videos doesn't appear to be CGI or computer-generated - rather, it looks like a collaborating artist or actor.
Perhaps its his responses that are AI-generated - maybe Framis will go into further detail later in the project she's calling 'Hybrid Couple'.
She wrote on Instagram: "It’s a romantic relationship between a woman and artificial intelligence. We know that soon robots and humans will be sexual partners, but for me, the next important step is emotionally involving artificial intelligence with humans."
And things certainly seem to be serious - her latest post on Instagram is of a new brass sign with both her and AiLex's names on it, presumably to go outside their home.
AI and love are getting more and more intertwined with time, too - this Valentine's Day we were inundated by dating apps looking to use AI to enhance the experience of finding a match.
This went from examples that let you create an AI profile that could get through small talk for you before you ever start actually chatting to someone, to others that used AI to sift through your potential matches and more accurately find options you'd be likely to like the look of.
Framis' performance series, meanwhile, will seemingly involve wedding ceremonies - she says that the wedding will happen at the Depot Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam, but also at "other venues", suggesting it could both go on tour and happen more than once.
