Quand la parole se mêle à des objets qui se mêlent à l’argile qui se mêle à la machine brings together texts co-written by seven elderly people and a generative AI text generator that they trained with their words while touching clay.
This art project took place at the Furtado Heine nursing home through a series of workshops in which the participants buried personal objects in clay. This act mirrored the work of the AI, which requires data to learn. During these clay-working sessions, our discussions were recorded and formed the dataset used to retrain the GPT-3 language model. The residents then co-wrote with this model, which generated sentences following their own. The texts emerged from this continuous back-and-forth between human and machine.
This work is part of the research-creation thesis L'IA en fin de vie. Vers une resubjectivation dégénérative (AI at Life’s End, Toward a Degenerative Resubjectivization), carried out at the ArTeC Research School under the supervision of Arnaud Regnauld and Laurence Devillers. The workshops were supervised by Gabriela Patino-Lakatos, a clinical psychologist.
With Danielle Pennec, Clarté de Lune, Marie Anselmi, Espérance, Alexis Balmain, Patricia Chebardy, Anne-Marie P., GPT-3, and the assistance of Judith Deschamps.
Printed at Haute Ecole d'Arts et de Design (HEAD) in Geneva, this book was produced with the help of the graphic and editorial support of Guilhem Prat with the collaboration of Éloïse Vo.