NPC to NPC Conversations:

After developing the tools to give the avatars an AI generated, custom personality, the next step was to get the NPC's to talk to each other.

Utilizing The Garden in the Machine's custom Unreal plugin, we were able to have the NPC's converse with each other entirely autonomously. This let us use the character form data to guide their personalities while leveraging additional prompting for particular topics to consider or even specific situations to negotiate. However, once we hit "play," the avatars are talking (or arguing) entirely on their own.

Eventually, we even developed custom voices to match the participants, sometimes exactly through voice-trained AI models (as is the case in the final version of my avatar).

Parag K. MITAL, Ph.D. is an internationally exhibited artist and interdisciplinary researcher working between computational arts and machine learning practices for nearly 20 years. His work examines the nature of perception in both humans and computers, often exploring the disjunct between the two, through mediums such as generative film, augmented reality, and large-scale archival interpretations. The balance between his scientific and arts practice allows both to reflect on each other: the science driving the theories, and the artwork re-defining the questions asked within the research.