M.A.R.Y.
M.A.R.Y. is a short film that began as an experiment in collective poetry with AI text generator, GPT-2, and co-creators, Jingwei Deng, Gabrielle McGuinness and Maaike Klein in 2019. Inputting lines of poetry—inspired by the women and female histories in our families—as "model prompts" for GPT-2, the AI generated text that was not only rife with gender-based stereotypes and biases but also inherently dramatic and suggestive of classic narrative scenes such as the sitcom family dinner or romance movie break-up. We began to collect GPT-2 responses as scenes and collaged these scenes into a short film script.
The following stages of production were a continued dialogue with digital technologies in which we wrestled for character/narrative agency and imagined ways of including many voices, in stories with many layers, that represent multiple ways of viewing the world. This struggle is embodied in the film by the back and forth between the characters, especially Mary and the “writers,” as each tries to write and rewrite the narrative within the frame of the verbal and visual languages that compose it. The film is intended to be comic, bizarre and quietly terrifying in places as this plays out. With a surrealist slant, its visuals are spliced between modernity and the 1970s and reference Alan Turing, The Computer Girls, Ada Lovelace, feminist literature, stereotypes in filmmaking, contemporary attitudes to technology and much more.
Importantly, our collaboration with GPT-2 is not just about exposing the limitations of AI and the gender biases in its databases but about rewriting the dominant narratives produced by and around emergent technologies like AI. In other words, instead of following the well-trodden path of simply criticizing AI’s inherent bias, we wanted to imagine new ways of reclaiming agency over it and using AI as a collaborator to tell stories on behalf of marginalized voices. Thus, to create a more multi-layered/multi-voiced script that dialogues with a history of computing and storytelling, we wove quotes from Alan Turing, Claudia Rankine, Sappho, Audre Lorde, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Veleria Luiselli and Ada Lovelace into GPT-2’s text. In doing so, we help generate a new story for the character, Mary, within and beyond the film.
M.A.R.Y. continues beyond this film as a manifesto:
MARY is:
A vision of human and technological collaboration.
An inquisitive attitude for storytellers working with and around technology; one that combines skepticism towards the status quo with the courage to be imaginative and experimental with computational tools.
A generative and collectively-authored creative process [that believes silences are powerful when they are combined].
A commitment to access.
A way of being heard.
I. Computational technologies dominate our lives, and yet so many of us know so little about them. MARY is about acquainting ourselves with the ‘combinations attained by the mechanisms.’ [Ada Lovelace] When it comes to AI, you do not have to dig too deep to find its limitations. MARY tries to reclaim agency over biases with these systems. MARY sees AI as a tool and a mirror. By collaborating with [and embodying?] these technologies, we can debug them.
II. MARY returns to the archives, to our traditions and histories of female and non-binary authorship. MARY remembers and recognizes the silenced histories of the women who built, programmed and continue to work with computational technology.
Final thoughts: MARY embraces complex human stories using multi-layered voices to unlearn dominant, essentializing narratives. MARY is NOT about solutions but about finding expansive logic systems that include diverse ways of seeing and experiencing the world and challenge archaic belief systems in turn. It welcomes the chaotic, the entertaining and the political simultaneously. It hopes to find the poetical within the technological.