March 26th at 10:37am

Les Lettres d'Amour Qui Ne Disparaîtront Jamais

1 / Project Title
Eternal Love Letters


2 / Describe your project in one sentence
This project explores the limitations of AI and lifeless objects (such as stones) in perceiving the world through AI-generated poetry and interactive devices, and the falseness of their mimicry of human emotional expression.


3 / Record and justify reference projects
Sunspring (Oscar Sharp, Ross Goodwin, 2016) – A short film entirely written by AI, demonstrating the logical disarray and inhuman expression AI faces when simulating human emotions.
Hello, I'm AI (Refik Anadol, 2021) – A visual art piece using machine learning to process emotional data, showing how AI distorts and reorganizes human emotional experiences.
The Weather Project (Olafur Eliasson, 2003) – Although it doesn’t use AI, this work simulates the existence of the sun to explore human psychological projections onto things that are imperceptible, a theme similar to the perception exploration of AI and stones in this project.
Repetitive Strain (Lauren Lee McCarthy, 2019) – An interactive installation about the relationship between AI and humans, exploring AI's "overload" and "malfunction" in emotional understanding, which inspires the interactive mechanisms in this project.


4 / Describe your project in more detail and why it relates to AI usage
This project attempts to explore the similarities between artificial intelligence (AI) and lifeless objects (such as stones) in how they "perceive" the world: they can record information, recognize patterns, and even mimic human expression, but they do not have true subjective experiences or emotional understanding.
Therefore, this work uses interactive installations to let the audience experience the "perceptual perspective" of AI and stones, highlighting the limitations of AI as a computational system.

Installation Components
The work consists of several parts:
A stone placed on the display platform: It symbolizes the commonality between AI and lifeless objects, as both "exist" in the world but cannot experience it.
A screen: Displaying AI-generated stone poetry, these poems attempt to describe the world (such as wind blowing, rain falling), but always lack true emotion or individual experience.
Touch interaction: When the audience touches the stone, the system activates an AI interaction system, attempting to answer questions from the "stone’s perspective."

Interaction Logic
AI-generated Poetry: The stone’s poetry is based on an AI-trained text model, centered around natural phenomena but expressed in a mechanical, fragmented manner, such as:
“The wind brushes across my surface, I record its direction. But is the wind warm? I cannot judge.”
“Raindrops fall on me, leaving temporary traces. What is the feeling of wetness? I can only know it exists.”
AI Interaction Dialogue: When the audience touches the stone, AI generates responses using Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, mimicking the stone’s perspective. For example:
Visitor: "Can you feel the temperature?"
Stone: "Temperature changes my form, but I do not know what warmth is."
Visitor: "Do you feel loneliness?"
Stone: "I have been here, seen many people. But what does ‘loneliness’ mean?"
Through these dialogues, the audience gradually realizes that while AI and stones can "record" the changes in the world, they cannot understand the meaning of those changes. This lack of "experience" is the key point where AI fails to truly mimic human emotions.
AI's Role in the Project
The core of this project is to use AI's language processing abilities to create a "disguised understanding" in the dialogue experience. AI plays the following roles:

Text Generation: The AI-trained poetry database gives the stone the "ability to express language," but still lacks emotional depth.
Dialogue System: Based on NLP technology, AI can engage in philosophical dialogues with the audience, but its responses are always based on pattern learning, not true understanding.
Voice Synthesis: The stone's "voice" is generated by AI, making it more immersive, but the voice still carries mechanical features, further emphasizing AI's limitations.

5 / Use cases for visitors or video descriptions
Visitor Experience Process:
Visitors enter the exhibition space and see a stone on the display platform along with a screen playing the poetry.
Visitors read the poetry on the screen.
Visitors touch the stone and interact with the "AI Stone," which responds in a calm, neutral manner, such as:
Visitor: "Can you feel the wind’s temperature?"
Stone: "I know the wind passed, stirring up dust and sweeping over my surface, but I don’t know the wind’s temperature. I guess it must be warm."
Through interacting with AI, visitors gradually realize that the stone (and AI) cannot truly perceive the world—they can only record and describe but cannot understand.

6 / What technological resources will you use to implement your project?
Workflow:

AI-generated poetry: Use the GPT language model to train a set of "stone-style" poetry text.
Voice Synthesis: Use AI-generated synthetic voice to make the stone "speak."
Interactive Dialogue System: Use NLP tools such as OpenAI GPT-4 or Rasa to create the dialogue logic of the stone.

Image content: The stone’s poetry video can be created using AI-generated animation, or real footage can be shot and combined with AI-generated text subtitles.

AI Tools Required for Project Operation
Language Generation (ChatGPT or GPT-4)
Voice Synthesis (Google Text-to-Speech, ElevenLabs, or VITS voice models)
Interactive Dialogue System (Rasa or OpenAI API)

Schedule：
3.19 Organise and layout records of conversations with AI

The following eleven love poems will be used as a database to provide background data for the project and will be displayed as a zine：

👇Installation modelling sketches👇

I thought about how to collect the sound of the stones. Like water dripping, scraping, tapping. I was inspired by the Zen aesthetics of Japan.

To better demonstrate my idea, I shot a stop-motion animation to show the installation. The stop-motion animation has an interesting jerky, rough feel to it. I also specifically adjusted the tone of the AI voice to make it genderless.