Trees of Thoughts: Dialogues with LLMs - Pablo Núñez Palma

What does AI reveal about us? What does it tell us about our aspirations, longings, dreams, and dissatisfactions? What societal pains does AI represent as a token of hope or fear?

The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a ‘cultural construction,’ as Kate Crawford describes in her 2021 book Atlas of AI, that must be scrutinised before its mythology becomes normalised. As the technologies tied to the term ‘AI’ improve, they will more seamlessly assimilate into our daily lives, eventually making the term itself obsolete. As Lev Manovich put it in 2024: “As AI progresses, it’s less and less ‘AI.’”^.Nonetheless, these technologies will persist beneath the threshold of our consciousness, influencing the fundamental aspects of human culture. 

In this context, the arts, which investigate human experience through cultural production, can examine technology – a known variable – to speculate about an unknown variable: the human inner world. 

Carried out in the context of the AHK AI Research Group, Trees of Thoughts: Dialogues with LLMs, Pablo Núñez Palma focuses on the current state of generative AI as a set of creative tools influencing today’s culture. Using LLMs (Large language models) and synthetic voices, he is working on a series of short video essays where the narrative is guided by existential dialogues with synthetic companions – AI chatbots designed for emotional support. Across these works, he experiments with a language prompting method known as ‘Tree of Thoughts’, where different prompts or questions lead to different paths or storylines, allowing for the exploration of multiple narrative possibilities that stem from a central premise or idea (Maciej Besta et al., 2024). The videos also contain interviews with experts and non-experts. 

Trees of Thoughts seeks to open a space for reflection and map a small but distinctive section of the AI cultural debate: the use of AI companions as external tools for personal reflection and the co-authorship of thoughts. By exploring this subject, he hopes to contribute to a deeper understanding of technology’s role in shaping our cultural landscape and the implications of human-machine interaction in our current understanding of human beings.

Pablo Núñez Palma is an experimental filmmaker and independent researcher whose work investigates the intersection of new technologies with audiovisual archives. He holds a Master’s in Artistic Research from the University of Amsterdam and a Master’s in Artistic Research in and through Cinema from the Netherlands Film Academy. His work has been shown in places such as IDFA, IFFR, and the Eye Filmmuseum where he showed his project Jan-Bot. His current projects Typologies of Delusion and The Artificial Unconscious seek to harness generative AI to support creative processes and explore ethical forms of human-machine co-authorship. 

You can read more about Pablo’s work here and his contribution as a researcher to our AI Greenhouse here 

Year

2024