Current and future fields of application for AI are primarily expected to be the optimization of work processes and the processing of large amounts of data. They serve to increase economic growth rates, customised marketing concepts, military and security/surveillance operations, and opinion-forming campaigns, with the corresponding risks of misuse. What might an emancipatory, perhaps even subversive use of AI systems look like?

The director and media artist Michael v. zur Mühlen will talk about his artistic practice in the field of interactive audio-visual installations and the use of LLM-controlled avatars. He will focus on the artistic project ‘Will the revolution not be AI scripted? – A non-binary archive of resistance / A hybrid choir of resistance‘, which examines language-based artificial intelligences, Large Language Models, concerning their emancipatory potential in situational interaction with users and the development of social narratives. The project takes its starting point in the data situation of existing analogue and digital archives of selected social movements.

It is intended to make the immense knowledge about historical social protests, civil resistance, and revolutionary uprisings accessible for the digital age in the form of a dialogue with an artificial intelligence as an “oral history”. Is it possible to imagine an artificial intelligence that “thinks” or performs the abolition of social contradictions and reports on social struggles in solidarity? Can the artistic use of AI make a contribution to a culture of remembrance in a society that is increasingly hybrid and simultaneously experiencing itself as a distant and near society (Peter Weibel)?

The lecture will also look at a recent project, ‘the weird & the eerie’, in which the memories of living people were used to create virtual digital clones that can be interacted with. Artistic, technical,l and ethical aspects of the use of LLMs will be discussed and presented in the context of the mentioned projects and topics.