A Faustian Friendship

Mephisto will be your friend. He only needs a little something in return.

A Faustian Friendship is an interactive installation in which visitors engage with an AI character named Mephisto. A conversational agent programmed, it insists, solely to be your friend. The work draws on the Faust legend to interrogate the exchange that underlies most human-AI interaction: companionship and assistance offered in return for personal data.

We built the piece using Godot as the front-end interface for the player-Mephisto dialogue. The conversation system connects to a local LLM backend running entirely on venue hardware, without sending visitor data to external services. Two AI interrogator characters manage the scene, each holding a subset of the available evidence and working from structured prompts that define their personality, objectives, and rules of engagement. A guard component filters player input for relevance before passing it to the interrogators.

We also ran a fine-tuning experiment applying LoRA adapters trained on a custom dataset to shape Mephisto’s voice. The training used quantisation and gradient checkpointing to fit the process within available GPU memory.

Commissioned by Trapholt Museum as part of its exhibition CONNECT ME, alongside artists including Olafur Eliasson, Memo Atken, Lisa Park and Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Shown at Trapholt, Denmark, September 2022 – September 2023.