VIDEO POST relaunches Spambots by Neil Mendoza. The protagonists, a group of spam cans that, in response to the enormous amount of spam content generated by artificial intelligence, are transformed into robots with the power to tell their stories through a combination of mechanics and deep learning. Each is equipped with a four-key keyboard; together, they are able to type the entire alphabet along with some punctuation marks. Their swine prose is generated by a large-scale language model based on deep learning and fine-tuned to a specially modified version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a novel where each character is born into a caste destined for his or her own fate, just like the industrial farm animals that end up in Spam.
Neil Mendoza, Spambots, 2023