How can we re-appropriate and turn synthetic text-generation softwares into powerful tools for change and activism through arts and design methodologies and explorations?

As the world loses its mind with the arrival of powerful AI mimicry chatbots, the Master Media Design department organised this one week workshop to help participants take a step back, explore at how such synthetic text generators work, how they are initially trained and how they can be reinvested using new bespoke datasets. Moving beyond the fear and the hype of these new technologies, participants were asked to collectively reflect and explore how these algorithms convey biases from their creators; biases that are located at the level of their datasets these technologies have been trained on. Then, the workshop invited participants to freely explore through hands-on techniques – using large sheets of paper, pen, scissors – how these technologies can be retrained and actively reappropriated for the making of textual outputs that are more representative of ourselves and identities.

A selection of these textual outputs is accessible here.

Students:

Léonie Courbat

Marine Faroud-Boget

Flore Garcia

Mariia Gulkova

Narges Hamidi Madani

Amaury Hamon

Margot Herbelin

Elie Hofer

Dorian Jovanovic

Tomislav Levak

Louka Najjar

Camilo Palacio

Faust Périllaud

Michelle Ponti

Hanieh Rashid

Tibor Udvari

Nathan Zweifel

Huiwen Zang

Teachers:

Sabrina Calvo, Douglas Edric Stanley