Part 1, User’s Guide: 0:00

Part 2, Malfunctions: 6:37

Part 3, Rest Mode: 14:52

Part 4, Overdrive: 23:21

Part 5, Restart: 29:53

 

We Are How We Live

An audio drama – primarily a first person diary, separated into five parts – of the evolution and self-interpretation of a conflicted protagonist’s notion of selfhood, conceptualised through the lens of generative AI. An exploration of the process of computation and generation as seen through the eyes of both AI technology and the human condition, blurring the lines between the two, emphasising the similarities and finding the key differences. Generative AI programs were used as both a theoretical framework for the construction of the characters in the story, and as practical creative technologies, as all music and sound effects were generated using AI.

This project required a substantial workload of collaboration, script-writing, learning and utilising newly developed technologies, and engaging in a constructive dialogue with contemporary understandings of generative AI to posit a thesis, or an argument, which is thematically and narratively woven through the project. It began as an experimental audio sketch in Week 5, of a strained mother and son relationship exacerbated by the latter’s attendance of a music festival, and the interplay between the masks we put on in different scenarios. Building on that initial idea, we decided to further explore this idea of self-reflection and self-interpretation, and adjusted what we had already created to fit into a narrative audio drama diary. Our theoretical understanding of the character, and the process by which he changed and evolved, was informed by Michel Foucault’s writing on the Self, and the particular cynical, self-obsessive tone was inspired by the likes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, amongst others. Ultimately, however, the pathology of the central protagonist was most informed by our growing understanding of the process of generative AI – the structures, computations, and limitations which governed the creative technology we were simultaneously using to accompany our writing. The piece concludes with a final diary entry reflecting on these limitations, and therefore the current differences between AI and humanity, a take-away from this entire semester that we would have been unable to formulate, directly or artistically, without the extensive study and effort we put into this studio, Automatic for the People.

We have come out of this course as better collaborators, better media creators, and more fine-tuned to the specific technological cultural moment we find ourselves in in 2023. The onset of generative AI has been, and will continue to be, overwhelming in many respects, and as media students we have found this course informative, but more importantly explorative; there are still answers to be found out there, and still more questions too, and this course has calibrated our brains to more intuitively understand the world of generative AI in tandem with understanding ourselves. We believe our major project is indicative and communicative of this journey.

– Louis, Bobby & Oliver