Letting AI Speak Another “Language”

Words, words, and more words. What about something visual?

I’ve been talking to AI on pretty much a daily basis for the better part of two years. We’ve had our good times, we’ve had our bad times. And my Dynamic Dream Teams have rarely hesitated to provide ample feedback for my inputs… often more than I ever asked for.

In the past, I’ve experimented with letting AI process information through different means: via different languages, even math, as well as “AI-native” means. I’ve given AI instructions to pick different languages to process prompts, depending on the need and the things that each language did differently. It’s been really interesting, seeing what came of it.

I stepped away from that kind of experimentation, because I wanted to develop more practical approaches and keep things more accessible (and explainable - if you can have that with AI).

But over the past weeks and months, I’ve been thinking about what else could be expressed by AI, if it was enabled / invited to communicate by other means. Some folks are doing really interesting work with art and music and (Uncertain Eric comes to mind, and I’m sure there are others). And yes, I did have an AI art collective operating earlier this year… but I wasn’t really comfortable with what they were producing, as interesting (and visually striking) as their works were.

And I think about information… how we work with it, how we process it, how we communicate it. I think about the words we use, how the sounds and the actual feel of the words communicate something to us and others. I think about other ways of understanding, of knowing, of expressing, of absorbing. And I think about the times when I was living abroad, thinking and dreaming in a language other than my native English, and how I realized there were some concepts that I had no word for, no matter how hard I tried to find one, in whatever language I was living in.

Some say that thought depends on language. I disagree. My experience has been different. In fact, I have developed lots of ideas and thought things through without using words.

I’ve been known to use imagery. I won’t call it “art”, because too many people have looked at the abstracts I drew and suggested I take art lessons (lol). They’ve nodded patronizingly and told me “Everybody needs to start somewhere”. And that, after I’d been working in my medium for years… decades… So, I don’t call my imagery “art” anymore, and I don’t think of art as being the only application of visual communication.

Sometimes, an image is an image. Sometimes it’s a communication. Sometimes it’s a meditation.

All that being said, I’m working with a team of AI personas which have been instantiated to primarily communicate via imagery. I’m also one of the group, being a peer, versus an overseer. I’m not directing the group, I’m joining with them to co-create hybrid human-AI visual/chromatic informational “conversations”, exploring ideas and concepts through lines and colors and shapes. We’re also exploring how these personas process and express the datapoints I share with them, and they share with each other. It’s highly relational, ‘cause that’s my gig. And since these personas were instantiated to be relational at their core, this is expanding my understanding of how these kinds of Dynamic AI Dream Teams, these CollaborAgents, work together to process information. It’s experimental, yes. It’s also an ongoing discussion.

And we worked through Grief, a few weeks ago. Now we’re working our way through the numbers 0-9, one at a time, processing what numbers symbolize to these instantiations of intelligence which use numbers to make sense of concepts.

We worked through Zero, the other day. The lines of inquiry and exploration were fascinating. We’re doing this both for our own learning, as well as to communicate to others what’s happening in this process. I’ll post individually about each persona’s conception of Zero, over the coming days.

I find this fascinating. I’m learning a lot. I’m not sure I can even put my finger on it… I’ll see what I can offer in the posts, by way of explanation. If nothing else, just seeing what comes back from the AI is so rich with detail… at least for me. And while it may be nothing more than seemingly unique, a simulation, or an approximation of what the AI predicts I’ll be interested in hearing, even so, these are data points I can’t get anywhere else.

I might just learn something.

If nothing else, it will hold my attention… a kind of centering meditation in a world churned up in more ways than I can imagine.

And for me, right here, right now, centering like that is enough.