“Digital Folktales” is Fabian Mosele’s project, a collection of AI and human tales from internet culture. It presents fifty-seven tales from the web, generated by two algorithmic companions and one human. It is divided into three parts (playlists): “Digital space,” “Folklore,” and “Common tales.” Each story uniquely represents the Internet of the early 20’s, from dank humor to more political ones. As territorial-based folktales are reiterated stories handed down through generations, these tales are distilled from the vast cultural heritage on the web. They reflect the Western web-centric human of the XXI century, as the AI generative models reflect the dataset they have been trained on. Instead of repressing them, the model’s biases, prejudices, and errors are highlighted to display the results of using a tool trained on nonconsensual and unsupervised collected data. Reading stories that mimic specific communities and ideologies makes it evident how the generated tales are simply a mirror that feeds off of the vast amount of online data. The folktales are written by GPT-3 through artist Fabian Mosele’s human guidance. Fabian prompted the titles and curated which stories were featured while not interfering with the text. For the illustrations, VQGAN+CLIP was in charge of the human help in direction through prompts and initial images. As we enter an era of AI-assisted creative works, “Digital Folktales” proposes a collaborative workflow that fosters transparency in the “black box” technology field. The videos, generated by GEN-2, accompany you on these cozy winter days with tales narrated by Fabian Mosele’s human voice. Check out other works by Fabian Mosele on cifra.com!