Conflicts: how do personal histories shape AI characters?
Conflicts is an experimental and generative multi-media artwork exploring the nature of human connection and conflict. Through surveys, conversations, and the real-time simulation of conversational AI NPCs, Mital navigates past interpersonal conflicts within an entirely generated conversation of battling NPCs, inviting his exes to join in the part debacle/part therapeutic pursuit[1].
Set in a simulated city based on downtown Los Angeles, the GPT-powered avatars are designed via relationship exit-surveys set to hash it out in an endless generation of simulated conflict. The artwork explores the capacity for AI to realize and personify real world identities in an increasingly tracked and digitized world. It further asks whether simulated agents could ever aid in therapeutic intervention through generative role playing.
Relationship exit-surveys
Beginning with a relationship exit-survey, participants describe themselves and each other, their patterns of conflict and their ways of communicating. Each avatar enters the encounter with a personality and a perspective on the other person drawn from these accounts.
Revisiting old arguments
Mital and his collaborators describe familiar arguments and recurring patterns of conflict in the generated conversations. One avatar challenges the artist’s decision to stage the encounter at all.
Meeting again in Los Angeles
Traffic and crowds surround the avatars as they meet on streets modeled on downtown Los Angeles. Beyond the simulated city, Mital returns to the relationships through real-world conversations and interviews, in his Glassell Park home and studio, over the phone, and via text message.
Gazell.io residency
Conflicts develops during Mital’s August 2024 residency at Gazelli Art House, where work-in-progress encounters lead to a series of generative video artworks. The project documentation brings together early tests and films. The NeurIPS 2025 Creative AI paper describes the surveys and generated encounters; it does not measure therapeutic outcomes.
