What Makes Us Human
Work
BOOK COVER / ART DIRECTION / DESIGN
WHAT MAKES US HUMAN is a contemporary, poetic exploration of spirituality, belief, and philosophy using artificial intelligence. The pioneering, cutting-edge technology that wrote most of this book, an artificial intelligence called GPT-3, has been trained on vast troves of text, including the major religious and philosophical texts that have formed the basis of human belief and philosophy, such as the Bible, the Torah, the Tao Te Ching, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the Koran, the Egyptian Book of The Dead, Man’s Search for Meaning, the poetry of Rumi, the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, and more.
The poetic answers in this book from GPT-3 were prompted, collected, edited and refined (sparingly) by researcher, philosopher and academic, Jasmine Wang and poet, artist and author, Iain S. Thomas. The answers represent the essence of humankind’s collected wisdom and knowledge, from all of history. Nothing like it has ever been attempted before.
Inspired by the tactile sense of touch, the design symbolizes the comfort and grounding that our physical senses provide in an era where learning, thinking, and even consciousness extend beyond the human experience. A minimal, ethereal aesthetic underscores the book’s themes, with embossed binary code forming a fingerprint—bridging the worlds of technology and humanity. As readers turn the pages, they are invited to traverse the delicate boundary between these two realms.
