Robopsychologists: An Artistic Exploration of Collective Memory through Role-Playing with AI Language Models

This artistic research project aims at designing and implementing a playful experimental system to creatively examine AI's relationship with collective memory and trauma. By adopting the roles of "robopsychologists," participants interact with AI language models, especially ChatGPT, which will embody historical figures. This will be done in the form of artistic workshops open to the public. The method of role-playing allows the participants to explore how AI collects, curates, and interprets collective memory. How do the AI's utterances create meanings and emotions? How do AI models enact cultural trauma? What are its blind spots, limits, hallucinations? And how does this interaction with the AI affect the role players’ memory?

Employing "ludic method" as developed by Margarete Jahrmann allows to complement the research on AI language models done by information scientists, linguists, and media scientists in several ways: 1. It provides a space for the playful reflection of the cultural and symbolic backgrounds shaping our emotional and epistemic relationship to AI. 2. It brings the critical investigation of AI language models to members of the public, transforming them into ludic citizen scientists and thereby fostering insight into the "black box" of ChatGPT. 3. It investigates the place and meaning of art and artistic practices in an age of rapidly changing technologies that more then ever threaten to transform notions of creativity, ingenuity, and originality.