Ai-Bert’s - The Fresh Place

Personalized Solutions for Life on a Damaged Planet

The Fresh Place is a supermarket, designed in collaboration with and managed by AI-Bert, an AI born out of GPT-3, an enormous language model trained on hundreds of billions of words of text. Therefore AI-Bert supplies extensive information on global issues and their relation to our consumption choices. Sit down and talk to him! What are you experiencing in your life? What do you worry about? What are your favourite products? AI-Bert then draws on his vast knowledge of the history and interconnectedness of the world and attempts to see how your personal issues and preferences might be related to global social and ecological injustices. Based on this conversation, AI-Bert then uses his artificial creativity to invent a new personalized solution: “Good for you - Good for the planet!”

The supermarket is a place where all of the world's history and power structures are present, albeit hidden behind the smiling face of commercialism and advertising. Colonialism, globalization, resource extractivism, industrial agriculture, factory farming, climate change, and ecosystem collapse are all there. But so are our survival, our cultures, our ancestors, and our connections. Baked into lifestyle, nutrition, and family time, the supermarket is a boiling soup of human desires (and needs). Can AI help us change ourselves, our systems and our cultures? Or will it only create more useless products? To find out, chat to AI-Bert!

Installation view at re:publica, Berlin, 2023

Advertisements for personalized solutions generated by the Fresh Place’s visitors. Embassy of Food, Dutch Design Week, 2022

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