Spot On poses the unsettling question: What does it feel like when a machine claims to know you? The work transforms AI’s promise of understanding us into an intimate, disquieting encounter. A monitor displays visitors’ own reflections and invites them to pose. As soon as someone takes a seat, a calm voice from the speaker beside the camera delivers a psychological interpretation. A multimodal AI model generates these assessments live from the camera image and speaks them aloud with unwavering confidence. It performs the very authority we often attribute to AI systems that claim to know the truth. The machine is authoritative, intimate—and often wrong.

Spot On confronts visitors with their desire to be seen and truly understood, while exposing the problem of confabulation in AI systems. The installation draws attention to the power of technological systems not only to describe reality but to actively produce it. By interpreting identity, emotions and intentions with apparent certainty, the work questions who has the authority to define people—and what relations of power are inscribed within these technological interpretations.

For more information on the installation, visit Spot On—A Machine Reads You Aloud.

To read more about the festival program and exhibitions, visit Ars Electronica Festival.