Covid-19 AI Battle

Two machines argue about a pandemic, and the audience decides what they fight over next.

Covid-19 AI Battle is a live, web-accessible artwork in which two AI systems hold an ongoing conversation about Covid-19. One trained on public statements by Donald Trump, the other on statements by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom. Visitors can watch the exchange in real time, submit their own questions, and vote on which question gets introduced into the conversation next.

We built the system as two separate services: a backend that manages the conversation loop and a frontend that streams it live to any connected browser. The two AI personas are served through Captain, our API gateway for language model personas, which handles text generation and routes each response through a text-to-speech service so both voices are heard. The backend alternates between the two personas, passing each response as the next query — keeping the conversation moving without human input.

To let the audience participate, we built a voting mechanism into the WebSocket communication layer. Visitors submit questions and upvote existing ones; the backend tracks vote counts and, after a set number of AI exchanges, replaces the next prompt with the highest-voted user question. Question state and vote tallies are broadcast to all connected clients so the list stays in sync across browsers in real time.

Shown at Ars Electronica (2020) and Kunsthal Aarhus (2020).

Made possible with grants from The Danish Arts Foundation