Echo’s Echoes: AI mistake, materiality and memory-making

This paper is an account of a collaborative project between three artists (3d artist, illustrator, rap artist), ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion, which aimed at exploring the ways AI-produced digital mistake and glitch takes part in memory-making. The paper touches upon the transformations of materiality, authorship strategies suggested by the use of AI, and will build upon the recent discussions about ChatGPT by Lev Manovich, Boris Groys and Mark Murphy that present its productions as a ‘collective dream without a dreamer’, a ‘collective unconscious’ or ‘zeitgeist-machine’. Fundamentally it will draw upon the ideas of multiplicity of agencies developed by Rosi Braidotti. The paper will examine audio and visual glitches and misalignments in the human and AI interaction that question and potentially redefine the position of the author.