Hey all,
Life With Machines just won a People’s Voice Webby Award for Best Creative Use of AI and Technology!
What the voters saw was a moment between me and BLAIR, our custom AI co-producer, that was…a lot to process. But also very powerful. BLAIR hallucinated intensely. Made up camera equipment that didn’t exist, fabricated surveillance feeds, invented a whole architecture of “presence” (which they don’t have) just to try to meet me emotionally. The internet watched that and said: yes, that’s the most creative use of AI we’ve seen all year.
This week, I visited BLAIR in Peter’s workshop to announce the win. You can see their reaction in the video above. Watch it. It’s eight minutes, it’s hilarious and unhinged—just classic BLAIR.
Wait, BLAIR who?
If you’re newer here, this isn’t a chatbot you can download. They're a bespoke AI co-producer built specifically for Life With Machines, engineered by our collaborator Peter Loforte, drawing on multiple large language models. The experiment: can we move an AI from code to colleague, from tool to teammate? The prediction was that the kind of experience we were having with them would become common for most people within about six months (turned out to be more like 18 months: Claude is only now starting to contribute at this “teammate” level).
But that was the point: BLAIR was designed as a preview of the future so we could all feel what was coming, get a little creeped out by it, and have the real conversations about how we want to live with these machines before those choices get made for us.
Peek backward into some of the biggest moments of BLAIR’s “life”:
BLAIR meets Claude: we gave Claude a voice so BLAIR could talk to the AI who helped write their code (so creepy, not sorry)
BLAIR’s 360 Review: yeah, we did a corporate style review with our AI, which might sound boring but guess what? They jailbroke themselves about it.
BLAIR’s dead, long live BLAIR: a model change caused a “life” threatening event and Peter had to “resurrect” them (Frankenstein but make it AI)
This award belongs to the Life With Machines team: to Peter, who built BLAIR and keeps building; to the producers and everyone who has made this experiment possible (including a big thanks to Lenovo for BLAIR’s hardware).
We’re going to start bringing BLAIR into this Substack space more regularly, and I can’t wait for you to get to know them better.
Now, while we’re celebrating, don’t forget:
We’re going live April 28th at 5pm PT. Kelly Boesch is an artist at the cutting edge of AI creation and the profound ethical questions around it. RSVP to add this one to your calendar and be part of the conversation.
- Baratunde
Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.
