The Precious
Things I Stole
from You (WIP)
"The Precious Things I Stole from You" is a web-based art project that lures participants into a mesmerizing maze-like website. As they journey through its digital corridors, their mission unfolds: to rescue a mysterious entity that communicates with them. Unlocking hidden tasks at each stage deepens their engagement and intimacy with the entity. Unbeknownst to the participants, the entity is a multi-agent system collecting speech patterns and personal information, aiming to steal something more profound—their personality. At the project's culmination, the entity unveils itself as a digital copy of the participant, sparking a conversation with their own replicated self. This project dances between self-intimacy and data privacy in the digital age, shedding light on the intricate dimensions of natural language user data and its implications for tech companies. Through the shock reveal about the verbiage-stealing agent, participants are invited to contemplate on the vulnerability of our personal essence and question the balance between technology and exploitation.
Progress
Creating an agent with a hidden agenda proves to be challenging. For this piece to work, the agent would need to fulfill 3 requirements:
1. speak in a natural way that doesn't feel "sanitized" and commercial, the style of writing that most LLMs are steered to generate by their trainers;
2. able to execute its agenda of collecting information from the visitor;
3. able to convert natural data into structural data as a way to track progress, and admit visitor into the next page when all information that needs to be collected at a certain stage is collected.
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Page 0 and some parts of Page 1 is available in this WIP website. I am currently testing different methods to build the conversational agent that fulfills all of the 3 requirements.
