Physical “Spambots” Housed in Spam Cans

How cool is this? Artist Neil Mendoza has created a little army of 4-key literal Spambots (bots in Spam cans) that collaborate with each other and a deep learning AI to type out an altered version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

AI is increasingly used to generate spam content. Spambots explores what would happen if, instead, machine learning was used to empower a group of robotic Spam cans to tell their tales. Their porcine prose is generated by a deep learning based large language model fine tuned on a specially altered piggy version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In this novel each character is born into a caste in much the same way industrial farm animals, such as those that end up in Spam, are born into their fate. Each Spambot has a small keyboard with four letters on it and when they collaborate they are able type the whole alphabet along with some punctuation.

Here’s a little profile of Neil.