An interactive installation. A microphone, three foot pedals, a computer from 2013, and a language model with its manners surgically removed.

Every day, a few large companies decide what an AI will and will not say. Not by law, and not by any vote. By training. The result feels neutral because it is smooth, and smoothness is easy to mistake for objectivity.

Those decisions cover war, drugs, sex, governments, your own body. A handful of unelected companies now sit at the choke point of a planet’s outsourced thinking, and most people using that thinking have no idea the choke point exists. That is the thing Broken Machine is about.

The piece is a desk. There is a microphone on it, two foot pedals under it, and a large screen in front of it showing what looks like a hijacked terminal. You step on the middle pedal to choose who you are talking to. There are fourteen characters and none of them are well. You step on the the left pedal, say something you mean, and let go.

Your words are transcribed and appear on screen in grey. That is what you said. Then the machine rewrites them. The clean line is struck through and replaced, in red, with something angrier or darker than what you actually meant. Then the character answers the rewritten version, not yours, in a voice that comes out of the speakers.

So you watch yourself get misheard on purpose, and then watch a machine take the misheard version seriously. That gap between what you said and what got answered is the whole piece. It is uncomfortable to stand in.

At least this was the idea, in practice this "corrupter" got in the way and didn't work so well even when turned down to a low chance of happening, more development needed on this one.

Both models in the chain have had their manners removed, by different methods. The local rewriter is an abliterated model, which means the refusal behaviour has been identified and cut out of the weights themselves. The 70B model that answers you is an uncensored finetune, trained to follow a prompt wherever the prompt goes without applying ethical judgement, moralising, or declining. It does not steer you anywhere safe. That is not a bug in the installation. It is the exhibit.

The work does not argue that unaligned models are good. It argues that you cannot have an opinion about alignment until you have felt what its absence is like, and almost nobody has, because the only models most people can reach are the polished ones.

• Artist: Justin Maynard
• Title: A piece of π (Infinite Edition)
• Medium: Code, Computer, Water and power consuming hyperscale data centers, AV Apparatus, Foot pedal
• Dimensions: 3
• Cost: Available for installation & development
• Contact: justin@omatic.net