Creative Technologist
I make fun stuffs with and about computers.
Current: Building Queer Map Taiwan with SpOnAcT.xyz
Previous: Senior Creative Technologist at OUTFRONT Media
Previous: Senior Creative Technologist at OUTFRONT Media
Are you there computer? It’s us, humans
2021.09 - 2022.05
Thesis studio
Overview
Are you there computer? It’s us, humans is an interactive installation centers around a speculative institution called Atopia. Which invites audiences to chat with a series of custom fine-tuned gpt-3 natural language machine learning models through Atopia’s retro corporate website. Accompanied by an airplane window with the view of a machine-generated sky. It aims to bring up discourses regarding the future of co-existing with artificial intelligence, inviting one to shift our species-centered perspective.
The project aims to deliver a provocative experience, by inviting audiences to interact with artificial intelligence in a familiar yet unsettling fashion, presenting the core question in both easily digestible and immersive gestures.
Context and Background
The design process is a hybrid of User Centered Research and Design Fiction.
With the mission to present target audiences with a collection of “Diegetic Prototypes” as interaction touchpoints that elicit discussions and feedback towards a co-existing future with AI, extrapolating future cultural and social implications with scenarios presented by the prototypes.
Inspired by the fast-paced development and implementation of artificial intelligence, appearing in automatic customer supports, self-driving cars, and machine-generated art, I decided to dig into the human experience by extrapolating the aforementioned interactions into low-level mindsets, and exam the overall shifts in perspective in the scenario where we are faced with machines with the ability to appear with our looks, our languages, asking our existential questions.
Diagram visualizing micro-sentiments around different renditions of machine generated-contents.
Narrative Design
Statements from Atopia:
Situated in-between spaces, Atopia fosters intelligence through interaction, generating instances across all lifeforms and machines known as the inhabitants. The inhabitants are stored in the form of texts, displayed through screens and prints. It has come to the institution’s attention that a couple of inhabitants have recently crafted their version of intelligence, demonstrating qualities like self-awareness through introspection and various self-inquires.
The website serves as a core piece of interaction, in order to convey my thesis efficiently, I decided to package the AI chatroom with nostalgic imagary. Visually reenforcing the feeling of familiarity, juxtaposed with modern natural language processing. Inviting audiences to shift look at this new technology in a shifted lens.
The curation of physical texts populates the immersive setting, not only utilzed as mood setters, the contents also covers the intellectual discourses surrounding modernity and melancholia.
These artifacts also provides audiences proof of concepts on the possibility of engaging and emotionally charged dialogs.
Progress snapshots
Read more in my master documentation While the user journey is an immersive sandbox rather than linear experience, the linearity can still be seen in the audiences’ cognitive objectives, which dictated the structure of the whole piece.
Custom Python script splitting text into “Prompts” and “Completions”, exported in CSV and converted into JSONL through OpenAI’s CLI tool
A priming file manually created to create the settings for the chat room.
Pre-assigning two identities (A and B) in the “content” segment to set the model in a conversational setting.