AI Anthropology: Staging Retrieval-Augmented Generative Conversations Beyond the Illusions of Scientific Understanding

Cluster member Maxime Le Calvé went for a two-week research stay in California, invited by the Center for AI and Experimental Futures at UC Davis. His talk, titled »AI Anthropology: Staging Retrieval-Augmented Generative Conversations Beyond the Illusions of Scientific Understanding«, addressed the challenges of engaging AI in ethnographic experiments and analyzed the potential of co-creative knowledge production with Large Language Models. He also led a hands-on workshop introducing participants to Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) methods for curating ethnographic conversations, and co-facilitated an advanced workshop with anthropologist Joe Dumit, focusing on the AI analysis of a large ethnographic corpus.

That same week, Maxime led two other workshops at the UC Davis Anthropology Department, collaborating with the students of Tim Choy to produce the second volume of his radical open-access series Drawing People Drawing.

Finally, he contributed as a graphic ethnographer to the documentation of two performances by Dorte Bjerre Jensen and Joe Dumit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA), as part of his collaboration with the EER project (Aarhus University / Olafur Eliasson Studio).