Small Alterations


A user sits at a computer screen displaying the BBC News home page. Upon opening an article, a browser extension pops up, offering a quadrilateral compass of political spectra. After selecting a position on it, the user watches as the article is rewritten by an AI injecting viewpoints and phrasing reflecting exaggerations of that political bias.

Drawing on Barthes’ The Death of the Author to interrogate any definite meaning we might ascribe to the machine, emulating Raymond Queneau’s experimental, uncanny reiterations of a familiar voice, evoking a feeling of eerie to perhaps suggest that, in the words of Mark Fisher, “the concepts and frameworks which we have previously employed are now obsolete”. The work’s significance is that our trust in the new, generated content might be altered by the seemingly legitimate context within which it rests, a provocation I continue to explore.

Built as an extension for Firefox using Javascript and the Ollama API to invoke a local LLM model.