The Role of the User in Meaningful Production with AI

This poster documents the basic points of a research project that investigates the role of the user of AI systems in the production of meaning and content. Whether the user is a student, a researcher or an artist, the output of the human-machine cooperation should be original. As a generative assembly of textual or visual data, the outgoing content looks like the rephrasing of things that have already been said. But how AI generated texts and images surprise us? How is their production been triggered? Beginning form the assumption that the user is a compositor of thoughts and connotations, which, in cooperation with the AI system could lead to the formation of an out of the box thinking, we notice that her practice has similarities to the practices of the gardener, of the interviewer and of the interrogator. But what do these similarities concern? What do a gardener, an interviewer and an interrogator have in common with the user of AI? We’ll attempt to answer these questions with the help AI itself, placing ourselves in the position of the user in question, thus creating a simulation. This is what we like to call a tautological method, since the compositing procedure replicates itself, permitting a first person observation. Whether this approach will be fruitful of not, is something that we are going to discover at the end of this poster.