[Workshop]

Shapeshifting with AI

Novembmer 2023 & 2024

2-day workshop commissioned by INTL International (online, 2023), hosted at iii in The Hague (in person, 2024).

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Course Brief

How do you imagine you would behave, feel, or communicate if you became someone or something else? Can we explore that imagination using generative AI?

In this two-day workshop, participants will playfully use their bodies to place themselves in new situations as a different being. They will simulate becoming another being of their choice and learn how to transform themselves using a generative AI model, Stable Diffusion.

From OpenAI’s generative AI product Dall-e’s promotional image of two bears working on AI research, to ShutterStock’s anthropomorphic AI image generator, to AI Furry artists creating scenes like a standing bear and a tiger hugging, companies and individuals have been producing humanised animal images that depict human-like traits and emotions.

I argue that anthropomorphism in AI images reveals human-centrism and reduces other beings to consumable reflections of our bodies. The simplified process of generating these images – quick and easy, further desensitises us to this problematic dynamic.

What happens if we reverse this pattern using our own bodies as source material for generative AI, while deliberately destabilising human images?

Can the process of feeding and generating AI media become an experimental exercise in accessing other-than-human modes of being in our bodies?

And how might we collectively shift from anthropomorphism toward non-anthropocentric embodiment?

In my workshop, Shapeshifting with AI, participants and I explore these questions. Our methodology combined field research, coding, and movement exercises, and ultimately created embodied source material for generative AI.