With more than eighty proposals received, the artistic residency and research program in artificial intelligence aimed at Brazilian researchers promoted by CloudWalk, global financial technology company,, revealed the three human-machine collaborative projects chosen by the selection committee. The projects will be developed over three months, over which the researchers will receive a monthly grant of R$ 10,000 and the computational resources necessary for their research.
Rodrigo da Motta Carvalho, physicist and master in neuroscience and cognition, will develop the project "Trippin' Transformers: Inducing artificially altered states of mind in large language models". Your project aims to artificially induce an altered state of consciousness – like those triggered by psychedelics such as LSD – in large language models (LLMs). Your idea is to create a measurable change in internal processes and the coding capabilities of artificial intelligence models. He starts from the hypothesis of the "entropic brain" according to which the increase in entropy represents the level of unpredictability of the system, therefore, a biomarker of changes in consciousness. According to the researcher, previous research focused on the investigation of artificially altered states in artificial intelligence, but no work so far has connected her to the entropic brain hypothesis.
The artist Lina Lopes, graduated in cinema from USP and master's in design, and the clinical researcher Eduardo Padilha were selected with the project "In Vitro Creativity: Interface for Imagination and Artist on Petri Dish", that seeks to answer the following questions: if a thought has never been verbalized, he exists? And if it can be materialized without going through language? With the challenge of transforming what happens inside the mind into something that can be experienced outside of it, the artist and the scientist seek to create a model of artificial intelligence capable of translating thoughts into images from the reading of brain waves, exploring, still, the possibility of lab-grown neurons autonomously generating art.
The third selected project, presented by the artist Bruna Mattos, it is called "Mycelial Orchestra: A bio-digital work guided by AI" and aims to merge fungi (mycelium) with generative algorithms of artificial intelligence to create visual and soundscapes in real time. Consistent with the human-machine collaborative spirit that guides the residency, the researcher intends to rely almost entirely on the instructions provided by the language models themselves to create an unprecedented bio-digital ecosystem, questioning, thus, the thin line between works of human authorship and works of algorithmic authorship.
According to Pedro Fonseca, responsible for the AI policy area at CloudWalk and coordinator of the residency program, not only the three selected projects, but a large part of the proposals received, had the potential to contribute to the broader discussion about the role of artificial intelligences in contemporary society and in speculations about the emerging future. We received more than 80 proposals, very interesting and intriguing, that range from the possibility of a machine psychedelia to the intricate relationship between the human brain and artificial neural networks, going through the sexual relationship between man and machine, for philosophical discussions related to artificial intelligence and several other fascinating topics. We are very excited about the research to be conducted by the new residents.
CloudWalk has a multidisciplinary team of over sixty people focused on research and development through intense and comprehensive exploration of artificial intelligence models. According to Fonseca, the artistic and research residency was the way found by CloudWalk to monitor investigations that are not necessarily on the radar of its internal team and, at the same time, promote the work of Brazilian researchers in artificial intelligence.
The residency started on March 31 and runs until July, when the residents will publicly present the results of their research.
