We were invited by Sal Pittman to bring PromptTank to Being and Beings in Luxury Fashion, an evening event hosted in the Barbican Conservatory. The whole event was built around the themes of Governance for Tomorrow, the Centre for Sustainable Fashion’s programme exploring how the luxury fashion sector might be governed differently, with justice for other species, future generations and people alive today at its heart.
It’s hard to imagine a better setting for a conversation about the more-than-human. A tropical forest growing inside a brutalist concrete hulk is already a pretty strange meeting of nature and the made world, and the plants made for quite the backdrop to PromptTank’s projections.
Guests gathering in the Barbican Conservatory
What people made of it
PromptTank drew a steady crowd all evening, and lots of people wanted to know what was going on under the hood, which models it uses and how the pieces fit together. The richer conversations, though, were about the more-than-human. People connected it to other speculative uses of AI, from projects that try to give voice to the “thoughts” of a river, to ideas about AI reading the environmental footprint of everyday objects.
Not everyone was convinced, which made for some of the best discussions of the night. Some were sceptical that AI could ever speak for nature, since it inevitably filters non-human perspectives through human language and human concepts. Maybe nature doesn’t have a language waiting to be translated, and the harder problem is that we haven’t really learned how to listen yet. Others saw value in AI as a way of working through big datasets and complex systems, as long as human experience and judgement stay firmly in the loop. There was also a thread of unease about handing creativity and knowledge over to AI systems at all, which is a fair reminder that being open about what happens to people’s inputs really matters.
One person compared the experience to the House of Beautiful Business, but felt PromptTank offered something more immersive and critical than just adding another voice to the already crowded conversation about AI. The one thing we’d change is the footprint. Space was tight, and at times there was a proper jam around the table, so next time we’ll be asking for a bit more elbow room.
Thanks
Huge thanks to Sal Pittman for inviting us and for excellent production, to Matt Collins for helping facilitate the event, and to Jade McSorley, Dr Francesco Mazzarella and the whole team at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion. Thanks also to Emma Charleston and Francesco for the photographs.
