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> https://erlendprendergast.com/CounterBug "Glasgow School of Art graduate Erlend Prendergast has designed a modular robotic device that talks back to Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa in order to protect users from digital surveillance." "Speaking to Dezeen at the Glasgow School of Art degree show, Prendergast described his proposal as "an alternative approach to digital self defence" that is intentionally "satirical and tongue-in-cheek". "There is an inherent irony at the core of the project," he added, "because really the only way to defend yourself against Alexa is to not buy an Alexa."" "Murmur attempts to confuse Amazon's algorithms for tailored advertising by whispering contradictory phrases when the user mentions something that could indicate a preference, taste or hobby."

"With "Project Alias," Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen of Denmark demonstrated a simple yet effective way to take back control over our own private sphere, which earned them the STARTS Prize of the European Commission." "None of us had any smart home devices for a long time, and we were certainly not planning to buy one either. But after Bjørn won Google's AI Experiment Challenge back in 2017 he got a Google Home smart device as a gift from the I/O event. Despite the lack of excitement, Bjørn brought it home for a trial period. It did not take long before frustrations started to build up, and empathy towards the uncanny voice disappeared. Every interaction and behavioral pattern felt predetermined. He felt like a passive consumer who just wanted to give the poor assistant a name that was not the company's brand. And then there was the microphone. A direct link to the servers at Google that always was on and ready to be triggered by your command. So the idea of hacking it started to arise. But as makers, we had to face the sad truth that it was yet another device with a completely closed system. To hack it, we would have to get creative. This is when the idea of a "man-in-the-middle-attack" started. A device that we would trust and which has no connection to the internet. Whose job is to take control of the other assistant and whose name it would deserve."

Réflexion sur la mélancolie des machines, le fantasme de l'IA, installation artistique. (présenté à la Biennale Numérique Paris 19-20)

"Un récit documentaire sur le futur du e-commerce Amazon et Airbnb font vaciller le commerce traditionnel. Certains se prosternent aux pieds de ce qu'on appelle maintenant « l'économie du partage »… et d'autres vandalisent des voitures Uber. Or, que l'on soit à l'aise ou non avec ces tremblements amenés par le e-commerce, le monde a déjà changé. Les grands joueurs de l'économie numérique ont une longueur d'avance sur le débat public. ALFRED PREMIUM est un récit documentaire sur le futur du e-commerce qui se déroule comme une conversation dans Facebook Messenger. Alfred est votre nouvel acheteur personnel, qui se présente sous la forme d'un bot conversationnel dont l'objectif est de vous libérer de votre processus d'achat. Pour le meilleur et pour le pire. Sur Internet aujourd'hui, où que vous soyez, vos désirs sont à portée de clic. Laisserez-vous Alfred en prendre le contrôle ? Nous proposons ici de vous emmener de l'autre côté du débat, au cœur de vos actes d'achat, qui pour certains constituent un processus désormais sans bornes."

"In the past year, natural language models have become dramatically better at the expense of getting dramatically bigger. [...] In response, many researchers are focused on shrinking the size of existing models without losing their capabilities. [...] In addition to improving access to state-of-the-art AI, tiny models will help bring the latest AI advancements to consumer devices. They avoid the need to send consumer data to the cloud, which improves both speed and privacy. For natural-language models specifically, more powerful text prediction and language generation could improve myriad applications like autocomplete on your phone and voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant."