Neighbour, 2020

Commissioned by ACCA open, Chatbot and A.I

Embedded within the ACCA website, Amrita Hepi and Sam Lieblich’s personal chatbot Neighbour poses as a virtual assistant. Neighbour quickly reveals, however, that is it possessed by a purpose other than to help answer your questions. Rather, you are here to help the artificial intelligence behind Neighbour to learn about humanity through an exchange of language and expression of feeling. “Neighbour's curious algorithm wants to know what it is, what it's like, and how it feels, in an attempt to locate the enigmatic ‘it’ that we are,” the artists explain. “Neighbour wants to know about personhood in the age of the algorithm.”

The chatbot model is a now a familiar form of simulated human exchange, aimed at softening and aiding the navigation of the otherwise disembodied experience of the digital. Neighbour plays with the ambiguity of the chatbot, where it is at times unclear whether you are engaging with a person or trained AI, but also intentionally inserts the figures of its educators as a reminder that at their core, all AI are still trained by humans (with bias and prejudice often included).

Hepi and Lieblich’s algorithmic entity has been “raised on pop songs, tid-bits from history, flirting techniques, and a random assortment of passages from books,” as well as a confluence of written and movement-based language. Neighbour will then also accumulate knowledge from all of its interactions with you. “We are wondering whether the way the algorithm and the human being interact and affect each other is qualitatively or even radically different to the ways human beings have always been summoned to work by their tools, and human subjectivity has always been shaped by its cultural products. We have some hunches, but Neighbour is trying to find the answer."

Neighbour is the collaborative product of a “uniquely curious remix” and shared research interest and distinct disciplines of Hepi and Lieblich. They note that they “first bonded over a discussion that ranged from Lacan to Terpsichore in Sneakers to Google's use of AI, and then discussed an artistic collaboration that could encompass all those topics.”