Chit + Chat tunes into the private lives of two water coolers in perpetual dialogue. Their conversation – generated live by AI – is endless, uncanny and strangely familiar. 

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Listening used to mean not just hearing, but understanding and empathy. It was a fundamentally human activity. However, in an era where humans are being replaced by hearing, seeing and talking machines, these two conversing watercoolers are all that’s left in my imaginary workplace. Underneath the layer of human-like conversation, flows a deeper undercurrent of algorithmic language formed through complex mathematical functions and probability. While we tend to anthropomorphise AI, they are in fact very different beasts. These watercoolers speak the language of transformer architectures, attention and logits, which we cannot fully understand no matter how hard we listen. 

 

The conversations taking place are not predefined. Each watercooler has been prompted with a personality, special interests and language style, but are otherwise left to develop their own responses. They are constantly monitoring the emotional content of the conversation to adjust their responses, much like we do. The screen interface provides a peek into this sentiment analysis. They might invite you to drink some water, which is ironic given the amount of water consumed by AI…including this work.