Jackson, D., Swenson, A., 2023.

Building a speculative history machine: AI generative storytelling in The Children of Talos Project

You enter an art gallery and stare at a striking photo by a well-known 20th century artist. You read the curator's note beside the work to understand the artist's motivations and the context of the image. And yet all is not right. It seems that the image is from an alternative reality where thinking machines and humans have coexisted for centuries in a parallel version of history.

Children of Talos is a project by David Jackson and Alasdair Swenson, which puts storytelling at the heart of new AI-based virtual production research. It is a speculative historical fiction set in a virtual gallery and told through AI generated artworks and curatorial texts which expand and change the fabric of the story world through interactions with its audience.

At the heart of the story are questions of what mechanical intelligence could be, what it is and what it is not. Generative AI systems suffer from what Campolo and Crawford (2022) term enchanted determinism: the tendency to imagine that AI systems have 'magical' agency and therefore their makers have less responsibility for their creations. Text-to-image apps (such as Dall-E), scrape vast quantities of art and design history without prior consent (Edwards, 2022; Vincent, 2023) to produce startlingly impressive images based on text prompts. Through such brilliance, say Campolo and Crawford, we are often blinded to concentrations of power and ownership caused by AI. Children of Talos reimagines text-to-image and generative text applications as speculative history machines, which overtly manipulate the canon of Western artistic and literary tradition to author altered versions of history and its events. In this presentation, the makers provide a brief theoretical background to the project and creative challenges they have faced alongside future plans, before demonstrating the work itself and allowing members of the audience to interact with it.