In which I go for a walk… on paper
This is part of the work I’m putting together for my residency in Moskosel, in northern Sweden.
I wanted to use the opportunity of my residency, which was to consider themes of AR and VR, to explore the possibilities of the rapid rise of AI.
Already, I had ChatGPT create two dozen, or so, short texts, used as location-based podcasts on Placecloud, accompanied by illustrations created through Midjourney, and narrated by a synthesised voice that sounds like me, created via ElevenLabs.
For Placecloud, I needed these short stories to be factual, which turned out to be quite a bit trickier than I expected; it’s known that ChatGPT, and similar, has a tendency to hallucinate, and I was surprised of the extent at which this indeed happened.
I also wanted to experiment with ChatGPT in creating texts that were to be more reflective, more like opinion pieces, but connected to some of the locations I visited on the two trips I made during which I collected recordings for my main piece.
This also turned out to be a bit of a hit-and-miss, but, with some experimenting, some prompt-engineering, and some editing, where the most annoying part was perhaps getting rid of ChatGPT’s tendency to sum up its musing by ending with a feel-good reflection, I’m reasonably happy with the 9 stories I ended up with.
As a physical reminder, I’m having these printed in a little booklet, accompanied with stills from the videos that I recorded in the places the stories relate to.