Bagong Makata

Laying down the foundations of a language between mother and machine for a daughter, Czyka Tumaliuan attempts to teach natural language processing chatbot A.L.I.C.E. the Filipino tongue. The results are scrambled and indecipherable, despite a mother's insistence. A colorful pixel grid takes the resulting three poems made from a game-like protocol, endlessly spitting out repetitive conversations.

With this earlier chatbot, Tumaliuan points upon the surprising maternity needed to nourish machines as nascent language models simply did not have sufficient Filipino data. These tendencies towards repetition strike a chord as today, many similar systems are headed towards model collapse — polluting their datasets with their own outputs, leading to the very illegibility that Tumaliuan encounters.