Dog Walk: Narrating Human-AI Alignment through Companion Robots
Best Friends Forever explores intimacy, embodiment, intelligence, and alignment in human-AI relationships by co-parenting two robot dogs. Two artist-researchers pair identical machine bodies with local, customized Large Language Models as brains. The artists train model behavior and dialogue with them on questions of mind, embodiment, and relationality in the age of generative AI. This anti-Cartesian experiment is documented through film, performance, and writing, interrogating boundaries between simulation and authenticity as the collaborators exchange and optimize the AIs minds towards an outcome between human complexity and synthetic intelligence. The performance blends live human-robot dialogue with multi-modal imagery drawn from human and machine perspectives, creating a hybrid cinematic language. With primary interactions occurring in real space, giving LLMs presence and physical agency, BFF broadens notions of extended reality to encompass the ways in which AI and robotics augment, and ultimately transform, our sites of daily life.