prompt engineering

von Paula Berger, Malte Grotendorst

Lizenz: CC BY-SA 4.0

Voice messages in the future: six flickering frames per second, the light is gently psychedelic, text-based prompts create a hovering sociality. We'd call this a utopia.

English transcript

hi so i wanted to tell you i'm seeing a ~~new ~~ person today. i’ve spoken to the others about it, and generally i think there is a great sense of lightness in this regard. a hovering basic understanding that we are constantly reworking in concrete terms. you could say we belong to each other in many different ways and in a fundamentally changeable way. just like you feel at home in new places at some point, when you have experienced that place enough, and you know in the dark which furniture is where, even without thinking.

and the new person: i think we have configured the algorithms with similar prompts. compatibility used to be quantified, and that was kind of undercomplex. but I think our score would have been quite high. we both like slightly cracked concrete facades with evergreen vegetation. knowing that now already is modern to me in a good kind of way. this person's collective has a similar practice to ours.

they break symmetrical patterns into the asphalt surfaces of abandoned mall parking lots and fill the trenches with potting soil and perennials. we're about to meet at café neu, that’s the one with the big internet terminals, all tft flatscreens. they can produce relatively psychedelic lighting moods with them. and that's kind of magic.

i just got a haircut again. tyl was there (my crush) and i didn't know if i should want tyl to cut my hair. i mean how can you talk for so long if i know something that tyl doesn't know. anyway, tyl was busy, and the person who did it was named val.

i assume that at least half the people there are cultivating their crushes. somehow the whole thing has become something of a hangout anyway. and I must have known three quarters of the people who were there. that's new right? you can now prompt the look you want. I mean, it's a bit pointless because it's still people cutting your hair. and they then listen to it, know what you want, and together we can engineer the prompt a little if we're not satisfied.

so it's actually the same as it always was when you wanted a new haircut. but i wonder if that shows that we really think differently now. that we are so used to designing or changing everything based on text, and that just spills over into these islands where it's actually deliberately different. you could probably call it ~~ art ~~.

it's actually a good thing that everyone involved considers a haircut fun and no longer a necessity. but it is a pity that prompts have given the whole thing a somewhat instrumental dimension again. i mean is a haircut becoming a kind of work again? or is it just a kind of aesthetic irony? because i mean, hairdressers, well they're just very clearly not an ai that gives me what i want based on prompts.

we are moving soon, and there are these new residential complexes in the old shopping center which is now called the mall of primary needs. i believe and i hope this is meant to be gently ironic. i mean, they call the concept habiflex (which sounds a bit stupid), and not a machine for living, which would be cooler but also so out of date. there's a kind of manifesto which I think is a cool idea.

in it they talk about a very fluid communality and sociality in different and constantly changing contexts, and the building is supposed to reflect and enable this continuous change. that means everything is designed to be modular, and different rooms can be combined in all kinds of ways. anyone who wants to can have a single room or you can create larger group spaces and so on.

the others want to share a room between two people. i don't think i want to do that but they don't have a problem with that either. one way or another, none of this is permanent.