This is a repository to document our data collection process during our interdisciplinary speculative methods research project.
Navigate to Netnography to view our YouTube video sources and raw comments. Navigate to style guide for our aesthetic inspiration. Read Project Overview to understand our initial direction and read below for the subsequent evolution.
Chris Usher- christopher.e.usher@gmail.com Lucy Adeniji- lucy.adeniji@gmail.com Lucia Ene-Lesikar- luciaenelesikar@gmail.com
The objective of this project has been to investigate, capture, and respond to prevailing sentiment towards AI at this seminal stage in its development. With the development of models like GPT and Gemini, the sophistication of AI has significantly increased, leading some to speculate such models are sentient while others agree it is a clear demonstration that sentient AI is both possible and near. Such a seismic shift in the proximity of machine sentience has sparked debate and speculation around the relationship we humans might hold with sentient AI. While this spawns new concerns and opportunities it is also in touch with many ancient fears and beliefs that run deep through human history. Questions of sentient companionship, the divine, and the end times. While there is well documented ‘intellectual’ (that being academic or science fictional) speculation of these questions we have concerned ourselves with documenting the fleeting, contemporary public mood. Given the current prominence of AI in the public zeitgeist we live in a fragile moment of first contact; one where the fears and imagination of humanity as a whole are encountering, potentially for the first time, a novel sentience. What are the ideas we use to understand it, the fears we place on it, the hopes we tie to it?
To understand these currents, we have applied netnography to online discourse around AI. Drawing from this an appreciation for the prevailing narratives and themes surrounding AI, we cluster our findings around these themes and subject them to close semeiotic analysis, using the symbols and connotations of language used to understand the deeper meaning and significance of these themes. Drawing insights from this analysis, we then conducted a process of creative speculation, drawing on practices of science fiction writing and art practice to develop a fictional origin/creation myth for AI in the form of a narrated video. Both the decision to pursue this genre and the content developed within it draw upon insight made in our semeiotic analysis. We draw on both human insight and AI interpretation to develop this material.
Style Guide: Selections from 'Our Universe', 'Arrival', 'Powaqatsi', 'Koyaaniqatsi', 'Baraka' and a few other selected shots.