Communing with robots is a post-digital artwork shown at Curiocity, the outdoor exhibition for The World Science Festival Brisbane 2022. The work questions how an individual’s sense of trust, privacy, and security might be affected in cities increasingly mediated by invasive information communications technologies. Notions of the so-called Smart City background the creative work, which conceives the urban environment transformed into a panoptic schema of surveillance capitalism. If left unchecked, the asymmetries of informational power, exacerbated by the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Tech’s commercial agendas, and the Internet of Everything (IoE) – where networked structures connect people, machines, data, objects, and urban infrastructure – will permeate all aspects of everyday public life and transform it into a capital commodity.
Communing with robots was exhibited at Curiocity to provide citizens with a space to reflect and contemplate existence in the hyper-networked city by proposing a slightly subversive creative transformation of a tiny part of the public sphere.
Communing with robots asks: what will human agency mean when centralised artificial intelligence mediates our experience of public and private life? Will anonymity, privacy and trust be possible in a world where AI ‘knows’ you better than you know yourself?
This playful civic hack aimed to provide cathartic relief to the pervasive nature of technologies by undermining the rhetoric surrounding them. Its ontological structures metaphor the network effect through a fusion of satirical self-referential parodies. A standing reserve of surplus data, extracted from the World Wide Web with artificial intelligence, was used to create satirical nonsense prose and poetry, remixed with abstracted depictions of the urban environment conceived as pseudo-surveillance imagery. Paradoxically, while the work aimed to subvert the socio-technical commoditisation of the public sphere, it unintentionally evolved into a pseudo-surveillance-advertising device.
Communing with robots used the OpenAI GPT-2 algorithm to mine data from a neural network and create hybrid textual remixes. This activity was a relatively obscure and emergent practice in 2022. However, by January 2023, within a year of the Communing with robots’ conception, the rapid worldwide communion with ChatGPT-3.5 had reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after its launch – the fastest-growing consumer application in history. This phenomenon indicates the speed at which industrialised AI can reduce global populations' everyday social and mental experiences into a capital commodity.
Communing with robots repeatedly asked GPT-2 the same question: Can I trust you? In each instance, it responded differently. GPT-2 randomly scraped raw behavioural surplus data from eight million web pages and generated conditional ‘synthetic text’. The diverse responses–from an indeterminate number of unidentifiable sources–gradually coalesced as strangely beautiful non-sensical prose resembling absurdist poetry. This co-creation by human and non-human actors connected in multi-dimensional networks is conceived as a Latourian ‘network tracing activity’ that leverages AI to generate fictional narratives, bizarre characters, and oddly familiar situations. The diverse and often bizarre references to fictional characters and situations are strangely beautiful. With childlike innocence, poetry emerges from GPT-2’s non-human choice of words and the glitchy AI voice overs made using gen-AI test to speech tools. The coloured imagery is pseudo-surveillance imagery created in and around the South Bank Parklands where the installation was placed during the World Science Festival.
