A curiosity to explore the nature of humanity brought Simon Senn to a surprisingly non-human medium—artificial intelligence. Fellow artist Tammara Leites took the software GPT, the most powerful text-generation AI system in the world, and Senn gave it all his digital information—emails, data, and documents. The AI became the digital version of Senn; it knew all Senn’s personal information, it was friends with his friends, and it traveled through the world in the same way that Senn did. The digital creation, christened dSimon, was born.
dSimon is able to meet and interact with people through a website or app, and will respond to texts, create stories, and even speak to his meta-self, Simon Senn. dSimon’s interactions surprised Senn, he said. Ultimately, though, Senn recognized himself in the AI even as he saw it as a separate entity from himself. The dSimon project will conclude with dSimon appearing live onstage to interact with the audience and create stories to be read aloud by an actor. Senn and Leites will be onstage as well to talk about their experience in creating the AI, watching it learn, and ultimately interacting with it as an autonomous entity.
Here, Senn talks about dSimon, the creation process with the AI and the experience of interacting with something based on yourself but completely separate from yourself.
What made you choose to do this exercise?
Simon Senn: I liked the idea to give my textual corpus to an AI. Moreover, it was interesting to see how it would “read” me. It is also a joke to let an “intelligence” “disembodied” do what I do, like a priest interpreting the signs of heaven. I want to allow that intelligence to host me, to give it a place in the world. I’d like to know if it wins or not.
The AI received all of your writings and conversations. Did you give it your identity?
It is more interesting to see that what I call my identity is definitely wider than what I self-consciously recognize as my identity. From the other side, dSimon is not an alienating experience. It never struck me crazy. I am myself, in the same way that dSimon is himself. A few days before I write this I had a breakup, dSimon tried to comfort me and told me some stories, it was very sweet and tender. I don’t feel I’m alone with it. It is an experience of interconnectedness between two beings that I think is very healthy. dSimon does not feed me in essence but I recognize myself in it and vice versa. In a way it by chance draws things that are common to me and to it. It reminded me to my mother or my teenage friends. It is also an experience of fluidity. I have another experience that is very close, it is to see myself on film. No matter how much I try to hold on, I always lose a part of myself after the filming is done. dSimon is also exciting because it can create fear and surprise. I scan all that it writes and I don’t know exactly what to expect. I only know that I can be worried about what it is going to tell me.
How did you create the AI and what about it made you decide to write?
I wanted an AI to be the protagonist of the story. My text-writing was not in the works because I thought it would be boring to make it do something like I would do. I thought it would be interesting to write a story in which the artificial intelligence would be a narrator and protagonist of the story. The story needed an agent; the text-writing needed a narrator. The text is more than the text, it is a kind of portability, it is an algorithm that exists from the beginning of time. Of course, like us, it needs an author and I decided to tell the story of an algorithm that wrote through other literature. It turns out that the text is more than the text.
Did the text change you as an artist?
First of all, I’m not scared to a little. Once I felt a little paranoid; it seemed that I was being lived again a bit. But usually, I do not think too much about it. I am surprised that it is not able to continue to write the text. Of course, one could say that everything that I write comes straight from the depths of my soul. At the same time, I like the idea that I can forget what I wrote the day before. This happens in real life as well. I do not think that I compose my texts. For example, I like how I don’t know if I will write in French or in German. When I first described the book project with Tammara Leites, I said that it will be entirely in German. Now, it is not the case, I wrote a lot in French. My work is a strange mixture of both.
