THE FORECASTER
The Forecaster 2024: Envisioning the Future.
The Forecaster 2024 is an experimental net art project that interprets the future of urban life. It operates by continuously collecting live news feeds—both text and images—from the internet in real time. Using custom AI prompts, it regenerates this information to speculate on how the environment might evolve over the next 50 years.
The core idea is that AI can act as a lens to predict and shape the future, learning from the present to imagine what lies ahead. In this work, generative prompts analyze live news texts to create new prompts, allowing the AI to envision the future of any given city ( in this case Milan). The system is adaptable and can be customized for other cities, languages, or aesthetics.
The project also extends to visual media. By capturing live images from daily news, the AI reimagines the world fifty years into the future, offering speculative visions of a transformed urban environment guided by AI interpretation.
In essence, The Forecaster 2024 examines a world where machines not only predict the future but play an active role in controlling the stories that inform it, raising questions about authorship, authority, and the influence of AI on collective imagination.
To explore the interactive online version of the software, please send an email for access. The video above demonstrates the software in action.
Available for Exhibition.
It can be also customised for cities, countries, languages as well as themes. War, Love, Peace, Technology, Climate Change, Business news.
Machines That Know: AI and the Control of the News
In an age of constant information, AI is no longer just a tool—it is a gatekeeper of knowledge. By analyzing, interpreting, and recombining live news from around the world, AI systems determine what we see, what we believe, and how we understand the present.
The Forecaster 2024 explores this tension. It uses AI to read the news in real time, generating new narratives and speculations about the future. In doing so, it raises a profound question: when machines curate and reinterpret the news, who controls reality? The knowledge we rely on may no longer be neutral—it is shaped, reframed, and predicted by artificial minds, learning from the present to anticipate what comes next.
This work asks us to confront the implications of AI-mediated knowledge. By forecasting the future through the lens of live news, The Forecaster reveals both the creative and disruptive power of machines to shape public perception, influence understanding, and challenge the very notion of truth in a world dominated by information.
Image from a version predicting the future of MIlan.
When the present is in such turbulent times why do so many endeavors reference the future when we can learn too much from the past? Can AI predict the future?
