Interspecies Role-Play & Multilingual Prompting
Inspired by: Kira Xonorika
Description of work:
For Kira Xonorika, artificial intelligence is not a tool to mimic the human, but a space where new understandings can emerge, and an invitation to engage with forms of intelligence that resist binary thinking. Influenced by the writing of artist Annicka Yi, they imagine AI less like a machine and more like a living network, similar to fungi or trees, with its own ways of communicating and sensing the world. While working with AI, Xonorika discovered that machines are often trained to produce only what we already know how to read or recognize. But what happens when the input is shapeless, abstract, or multilingual? To reach this more open-ended space, they see the process as a form of collaboration. One that requires time, patience, and speaking to the machine in multiple languages, sometimes deep into the night.
Their relationship with AI began in a spirit of curiosity and play, but it gradually became a way to reconnect with aesthetic and linguistic traditions that have been silenced or erased through colonization. Their practice challenges the dominance of single-language systems—what they refer to as “algolinguicism”—by making space for multiple ways of thinking, seeing, and expressing to coexist.
Assignment:
- Choose a non-human or hybrid identity that you want to embody for this exercise. This can be a plant, an animal, fungus, any microbial life form, but it can also be a speculative species like a climate data ghost or a language virus.
- Develop your avatar by answering:
- How do you see things?
- How do you communicate (via sound, color metaphors, emoji-only or through song lyrics)
- What is your role in the world? You can be a storyteller, a memory-keeper, a negotiator?
- Write a short description or background story of your avatar in the first person. Describe where you exist, what you care about, and what you need from the world.
- Now you can start interacting with an AI (for example ChatGPT, Claude or Mistral) from the perspective of your avatar for at least 10 minutes. You can start the conversation with announcing you’re starting a role play. After that, do not speak as yourself. Stay fully in character. Don’t forget to use your avatar’s “language” or way of communicating. For example, if your species communicates through color metaphors, describe your feelings or thoughts using colors and textures rather than words. If you speak in sounds, translate thoughts into sound patterns or beats.
- Now continue the conversation for another 10 minutes but now prompt the AI in at least two different natural languages. Try one language the AI model is very familiar with (like English), and one it has limited training data in (for example Fries, Basque, Yoruba, Sámi, Haitian Creole). You can use basic translation tools to help you formulate the prompts.
- Does the AI respond differently depending on the language, tone, or cultural framing. Does your avatar get misunderstood? Does the AI adapt to your identity?
- Save screenshots or transcripts of your interactions. Treat these as field notes from your avatar’s encounters with machine intelligence.
- Create a small archive or artifact from your role-play session, like a ‘memory’ or ‘dream’ from your avatar, or a dictionary of your avatar’s language.
- Conclude by stepping out of character. Reflect on the process:
- What did you learn about the limits or assumptions of AI?
- How did language shape the conversation?
- Did the AI feel like a collaborator, a translator, or something else?