Thank you.

I’ve only been able to go a few times, but the trips I’ve gone on with him so far just to Korea. That’s it recently. I went to the Philippines a very long time ago. I’ve wanted to go, come back to somewhere on the continent. I’ve heard a lot ...

I’ve never been. My close friend from MIT, his mother is Taiwanese, and he goes a couple times a year to visit her family and his family there. I’ve never been. I’ve always wanted to go with him. One of our friends who has a little more money than me ...

I was going to say, if you’re on a data connection, that’s really crazy. Yeah, wow.

That’s all right. My coffee still is not finished. It took me five minutes to press the button.

Yeah, go ahead. I have to go in second. I’ll let you all talk. If you have one more, if you have anything else, tell me. I’ve got to go in five minutes.

It’s like this idea that, “I want to be lazy. I want to have a robot do all my work for me.” Really, we have to be more collaborators with our tool systems in the end, no matter what.

The more woke we are to that, at least the less likely we are to be harming each other with our technology and our pursuit of it. If we’re aware of what it is as a societal addiction to doing things better and better and better, in certain contexts like ...

Tool-making is what separates us from monkeys in a way, or whatever our primate ancestors. It’s a blurry line if you look at the science. My dad’s a paleontologist, so he knows a lot more about it than me. I think that technology’s always been embedded in our species.

That’s definitely a really cool worldview on technology. I think a lot of people are waking up to that worldview, at least most of the reality, if not the whole reality. Humans have always used tools. It’s a really old story.

Absolutely. I always point to the example that the typewriter was originally invented as an assistive device. A lot of my work, camera stuff, has been called assistive in many ways because it’s assistive devices that are for everyone in a way.

The other way I’ve heard it said or the buttress to that I’ve heard from people more inside the industry is every augmentation is also an amputation. That’s the caveat to that worldview. You’re going, “OK, if we’re going to go trans-human, then where do we stop cutting things off?” ...

I really like that ontology. That’s a nice way of encapsulating it that’s refreshing compared to what I hear usually. Engineers have a hard time encapsulating what they’re working on sometimes, even the smartest ones. I would agree with that.

Assisted intelligence, OK. That makes sense.

My question is, is your vision here AI scary or is it AI good? I’m not making a value judgment. I’m asking you, by default, what’s the attitude about AI? Is it positive and playful or is it…

What I would say is, if you wanted to be really faithful, then it’s a question of whether the ideas represent…Work involving artificial intelligence can say a lot of different things. By default, it always says something about artificial intelligence.

Do you have a vision for that? Can you speak to that at all?

You don’t know yet. That’s what we’re discussing.

A chatbot, for example, that’s not just a language model. It’s also a UI. It’s got a visual element, probably, and literally just audio or whatever. If the deliverable is a document, that’s very simple if it’s a job description. My question as an artist is what’s the presentation for ...

For me, at this point, it’s a question of where the boundaries are on this knowledge graph. The way to think about working with a language model is that you’re never just working with a language model. It’s always embedded in a system of some kind, even if it’s really ...

Yeah, very slow.

I’ll stay calm. [laughs]

We’re past peak AI in a way this time. That’s really kind of startling. I don’t know. These are interesting things to think about with respect to interface. I’m sorry if I’m getting too abstract here.

I’m running into roadblock in my own work, I have to be honest, at certain points these days, because the technology is moving so fast now with respect to language modeling that, as soon as one thing arrives, it’s almost like the next thing is already being talked about, well ...

That makes a lot of sense. If it’s performance-based, the vision is yours, essentially. I’m here to assist in whatever capacity. It’s hard to say.

If it’s a performance, then it’s a performance. [laughs]

It’s a performance?

…thing. The user, the person who’s going to be experience this installation or whomever, the audience.

It’s a question of how much text to give to the person. It’s a pretty simple UX kind of…

It’s just different if you only see your lines versus you see everyone’s lines, that’s what I’m saying, or something in between. Then the question also is how far into the future do you get? Are you getting the whole script in a window, are you getting the next page, ...

The main thing is that everyone gets their own version of the site, essentially, or everyone gets the same version. Then everyone gets the version, and then Oscar Sharp and I, when we discussed it, we’re like it sort of changes the dynamic, because then everyone can see the script ...

The next question is now much context does each speaker get? That was where I got stuck on this before. In the Web interface that everyone sees, which maybe is different for every individual person, which is pretty easy to do, there’s a bunch of unique URLs. That’s the simplest ...

Yeah. The way I talked about doing this from before, the tech is pretty simple. There was a question we reached. The first question is, “Is it in real time?” That adds complexity. The simplest way to do it is to have a system by which people are uploading clips, ...

Yeah, some magical realist amount of time. I’ve wanted to do something like that for a long time. That’d be very cool.

One idea I’ve been throwing around a lot is the idea of a movie that’s very long or possibly never-ending that anyone can be in if they just log onto a website and wait in line. It would be funny if you could do a version of that as a ...

That’s amazing.

Yeah, I could also drop off if you want to settle the question of what the media is. The venue and the audience, I think is a really important question. This is physical versus virtual, it’s totally different.

There’s 10 minutes. We already had a prep for it yesterday, so I can keep talking for another five, just so I have little more direction here.

Is this your child? Oh, my gosh.

What I don’t want is for the AI to be kind of an expressive system that doesn’t represent the seriousness of the person behind the words initially. It’s not about necessarily that they’re serious words all the time. It’s more about the AI can misrepresent tone very easily.

We can do some generativity on top of that if there’s a desire to have poetry or something original that is said. But grounding it in quotes is going to be important to represent the individual well in this case.

Really, the approach that I would use, I’ll talk about with Michael if you didn’t hear about it, something called Tf-IDF summarization scoring. I would literally use sentences verbatim, and insert them in smart ways into the conversations, but make the AI part of it for conversation pairings.

There’s a third person in each conversation that is the individual that we’re working with, his writing or his conversation. Basically, there could be a third voice in the conversation. Then I think how the voice works can be sort of opaque.

I’ve always wanted to do something with that media, and I think it could be done remotely or in person, where everyone wears headphones and there’s a synced set of conversations where they’re paired in spread algorithm.

If the plan is to make this post-COVID in order to play so people can gather…I went to this beautiful skeleton of a performance once in Amsterdam that I think – it was a performance. It was just more music-based and dance-based than conversation-based. Everyone had these headphones that were ...

What if it was a group augmented reality experience where…And this is another idea. I really don’t like headsets when you don’t have to use them. I think that we’re overly reliant on screens, and especially during COVID. If the plan is to make this on the Internet, then obviously, ...

They do a scene that could be represented interestingly…You know the unity episode, where Rick is walking down the street talking to everyone, and it’s all the same person?

I think what’s required here is more deconstruction, perhaps. That’s just an idea I have, sort of in the way you might present…I’m digressing too much, but what I guess I was going to say is that this…Do you watch the show “Rick and Morty”?

That’s an interesting idea for a XR thing we could try. Now that I have a better sense of this being a conversation-driven thing, primarily, as the concept, because that’s sort of what I was looking for, was “OK, we’re trying to represent a conversation.”

Got it.