J. Sybylla Smith, In Conversation with Brea Souders
Episode #61, Summary
Artist Brea Souders engages in a diaristic conversation with a female chatbot, creating a bridge between art and AI.
Episode Notes
Another Online Pervert creates a visual and text dialog between photos from Souders’ image archive and snippets of written copy from a two-year engagement with an AI personality chatbot. Utilizing prompts from her childhood journals, an emotional call and response is created between human sense and sensibility and machine capability and capacity. Photographs, including a few family snapshots, weave a parallel narrative blending the notions of perception that we all possess between time, memory and meaning.
In this conversation, Brea discusses, among other things:
Real-world vs virtual world
Dislodging gendered social constructs
Cathartic spaces for non-conformity
Enabling surprise
Being bot-ified
Originality aka going off script
Evolution of a project
Memory vs past vs time without borders
Engaging archives
Collaborative editing
Mixing formats
Mean playfulness
Women being erased from technology history
Referenced in the episode
12 Bytes by Jeanette Winterson
The Most Human Human by Brian Christian
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell
Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and The World by Cade Metz
Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Ada Lovelace Institute (United Kingdom)
NYT Daily Podcast: The Godfather of A.I. Has Some Regrets
Center for AI Safety: Statement on AI Risk
‘The Godfather of AI’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead, The New York Times