Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) is one response to the critique of LLMs being biased, erasing diversity, and raising ethical concerns.The Artificial Intimacy project employs artistic methods, taking personalization of chatbots to an extreme by finetuning LLMs on individual social media data.We find that regular GPT-3 chatbots attempt to circumvent value-laden content through flagging prompts and producing generic non-answers with variable success.While the transactional nature of such output allowed participants to make sense of responses with less personification, fine-tuned models presented value-laden, normative, and familiar personalities, resulting in strong personification as a way of making sense of the interactions.This mimicry of emotional connection resulted in a sense of artificial intimacy creating expectations for reciprocity and consideration that the models cannot express by design.As the commercialization of interactions with chatbots continues, we discuss the ethics of such emotional manipulation and its implications for personalization of LLMs.

Despite the proliferation of research on how people engage with and experience algorithmic systems, the materiality and physicality of these experiences is often overlooked. We tend to forget about bodies. The Embodying the Algorithm1 project worked with artists to explore the experience of translating algorithmically produced performance instructions through human bodies. As performers interpreted the rules of engagement produced by GPT-3, they struggled with the lack of consideration the rules showed for the limits of the human body. Performers made sense of their experience through personification, reflexivity, and interpretation, which gave rise to three modes of relating with the algorithm – agonistic, perfunctory, and agreeable. We demonstrate that collaboration with algorithmic systems is ultimately impossible as people can only relate to algorithmic systems (a one-way relation) due to the material limitations of algorithmic systems for reciprocity, understanding, and consideration for the human body.