To reach a general level of intelligence, a system must learn how it’s situated in the environment. “Artificial Intelligence” is often discussed as a global and immaterial concept but requires local and physical infrastructures to exist. I started Symbiotic AI as an investigation into the tradeoffs of the local ecosystems, zooming into the ground zero of lives affected by AI.

Symbiotic AI is a software simulation of an algorithm’s coexistence with the ecosystem around it. During a turbulent season, a weather forecast AI attempts to decipher the chaotic system around its data center location by exchanging knowledge with the local species. As the simulation runs, the algorithm focuses its lens on the dynamic and localized evolutions from oak trees, milkweeds, hedgehogs, butterflies, lichens, and mycorrhizal fungi — slowly forming a cybernetic language of symbiosis. The data center worker inside the simulation and its human audience are bystanders, relying on AI to translate knowledge between nature and machine in this algorithmic narrative.

The project also consists of a research collection and a series of workshops developed by my partner Chao Hui Tu and me. During the workshop, the participants undergo a few embodiment and role-playing exercises and then collectively negotiate their existence with the AI agent. The output of the initial workshop was made into a zine and a digital toolkit. You can look into our research materials on the Symbiotic AI reading list channel, assembled with the help of David Hecht from Cybernetics Library.

This project was developed with the generous support of Driving the Human. Photos of the 2022 Driving the Human festival taken by Camille Blake.