CLiP Open Session 1: Lecture with Mario Guzmán - Who Am I Really Talking To? We All Know your chatbot is slowly changing you.

In this Collective Learning in Practice (CLiP) Open Session, we will explore with Mario Guzmán the following questions: When does a "what" become a "who"? How do chatbots make us feel like we are talking to a real human? And what does it mean for our culture, politics, and daily lives when we build emotional bonds with technology? In this talk, we will explore the story behind the talking machines we use every day. We will also reveal the hidden side of modern AI: how underpaid human workers are used to give these systems their friendly sound and “personality”, and how the internet’s biases shape the way AI talks to us. Along the way we will review artworks that build critical approaches to artificial personas and conversational systems.

This is the first lecture from the open sessions from CLiP #8 What the Body Refuses to Give. There will be free public events every month discussing the concepts, learnings, and explorations in Melly's CLiP #8 (Collective Learning in Practice Program), curated this year by visual artist and researcher Fernanda Olivares and supported by fellow and former CLIP#7 Janey Roanna.

About the guest speaker

Mario Guzmán is a Mexican creative technologist, artist and researcher working at the intersection of artificial voice, social robotics and cultural mediation. He is a PhD candidate at La Rochelle Université, where he researches the semiotics of artificial voice and machine personas (thesis “Voicing Artificial Entities. Semiotics and Cultural Narratives in the Development of AI and Robot Persona and Personalities”). For eight years (2018–2026) he operated and wrote dialogue for Sophia, Grace and Desdemona robots across Hanson Robotics and SingularityNET. He is a mentor at the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe in Berlin, co-founder of the Imagined Tech Studies collective, and Spanish i18n Steward for the Processing Foundation's p5.js. His work has been shown internationally at the Dakar Biennale, BIENALSUR and ZERO1.