Brent Bailey
Echoes is a speculative software suite that uses artificial intelligence trained on its user’s email, messaging and voice data to automate personal communication. It explores the ways in which our data can and can’t be used to recreate ourselves.
Description
Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has been working towards a single goal – “to develop machines that possess intelligence comparable to that of humans,” according to François Chollet. Mostly, this goal is accomplished by using data in aggregate – massive datasets that allow an Alexa or a Siri to behave like a person in general. But why not try and replicate a specific intelligence, create an AI that behaves like a specific person?
Echoes is a speculative software suite made up of three services: automating messaging over text and social media; automating e-mail; and automating voice conversation. Each model is trained on my own personal data: every message I’ve sent on each platform, every e-mail I’ve sent in the past fifteen years, and over 10 hours of voice recordings. Rather than acting as a sleek, helpful AI assistant, the products act for you, following their own whims. They are messy, unpredictable, and nerve-wracking to use. TThough I am its first user, this suite can be used by anyone who’s spent enough time online.
The suite explores the use of AI models and data as techniques for replicating and understanding ourselves. Though these models can capture odd truths, and even at moments behave the way we might in a given context, their basic assumptions go against the way we think of and view ourselves. What seems like a huge change to us is just another datapoint to them. They are entirely backward-looking. They don’t know how to respond to new information, to emergent phenomena. And they fail to understand the context and nuance of the ways we talk to one another. But they do offer a window into the ways our data reflect us, and the people we used to be.
Classes
Thesis Part 2: Production
Presentation Video
https://echoes.digital