Chat-HI: Exploring Indian National Identity Through Machine-Generated Text

Situated at the crossroads of computational politics and intellectual history, the article abstracted here interrogates Chat-Hi:, the prototype of an interactive art installation using a natural language processing model trained on a large database of speeches by Indian prime ministers since 1946. Machine learning (ML)–powered, Chat-Hi: generates analytically intelligible answers to viewers’ questions, such as: What is the idea of India? The media installation acts as a conversational archive, gazing medium and interpretive layer [1]. It fosters playful, intimate, interactive and relational modes of historical attention [2], inviting participants to actualize the past through present political and social questioning. Building on existing accounts on the inclusive and modernist endeavor of the makers of postcolonial India, we interpret Chat-Hi:’s output to revisit historical argument by contrasting Jawaharlal Nehru’s emphasis on diversity with Narendra Modi’s stress on unity. Far from...