Stephanie Dinkins chose to stop upgrading her family-history AI

The surprise in Stephanie Dinkins’s June interview with Are.na was an update she had decided against. Discussing her family-history artwork N’TOO, she told Meg Miller: “we stopped upgrading N’TOO.” She said upgrades made the conversation more encyclopedic and less interesting to engage with.[1]

Not the Only One began as research in late 2017 and took its first form in 2018. Dinkins’s project account describes a voice-interactive AI trained on oral histories supplied by three generations of women in her family, alongside culturally relevant material. It answers from a character’s own first-person perspective, bringing the histories into an invented speaker.[2]

That speaker did not become the orderly question-answering entity Dinkins initially expected. Her account describes limited, erratic answers, occasional insights and refusals to respond. She came to value the way those imperfections drew visitors into helping it converse. The interaction became part of the artwork’s subject.[2]

Dinkins links her practice to her grandmother, Bernice Curry. In her artist statement, she recalls Curry making a bathtub enclosure from old screen doors and proudly explaining its construction to visitors. A garden beside the family’s Staten Island apartment also drew neighbours into conversation. Dinkins writes that this everyday making shaped her understanding of art and community.[3]

For N’TOO, choosing material was similarly particular. In the June interview, Dinkins recalled rejecting suggested Reddit conversations and Cornell movie dialogue as unsuitable foundations for her family’s stories. She eventually used a Google “good news” dataset, supplemented by books, television and writing familiar to the women contributing to the piece.[1]

Her decision to pause upgrades makes sense within that artistic purpose: retaining a particular way of engaging can matter more than expanding the range of answers. As she told Miller, N’TOO remained “still very rudimentary, but still valuable”.[1][2]

Report an error or suggest a correction