What Lies Ahead is an interactive poetic experience that explores themes of artificial intelligence, language, human psychology, and artistic intent.

Through a simple text-based interface, this piece creates a dialog between its participant and a text generating AI, a version of the GPT-2 language transformer model trained on the Guthenberg corpus, a collection of approximately 60000 pieces of English literature. Every response of the participant is mirrored by the AI, which tries to complete the text as if it was written by a single author. Responses gradually develop as they are being generated in real time by the AI; each atomic element which constitutes it cascades through all configurations considered by the algorithm, allowing the participant to catch a glimpse of the inner workings of its interlocutor. The asymmetry of this conversation makes it all the more interesting; collaborating with a writer that lacks intent fundamentally changes how the participant interprets the text and guides its evolution throughout the piece. Despite a lack of intent, meanings emerge — the human tendencies captured by the algorithm resurface, sometimes distorted, absurd, or familiar.