SAM AI Experience

An immersive AI experience inviting visitors to co-create a bespoke, short-lived film by interacting with a chatbot on their mobile phones

Commissioned by telecommunications company Vivendi, the brief to Tellart was to design an experience that encouraged participants to reflect on the growing interdependencies between humans and artificial intelligence, using AI itself as the medium. The result was SAM AI, a chatbot capable of generating a short film about the relationship between humans and AI across creativity, community, entertainment, and work. Designed as a private showcase at Amsterdam’s Nxt Museum, the project combined emerging technologies into a deeply personal and interactive journey.

Exploring Human–AI Interdependence

As intelligent systems become embedded in nearly every aspect of life from how we communicate and work to how we create and play, the boundaries between human and machine expression are growing less distinct. What once felt uniquely human is now often mediated, interpreted, or even generated by AI, raising new questions about authorship, authenticity, and meaning.

SAM took these tensions as its starting point, not to speculate on replacement or competition, but to explore how AI might help articulate what it means to be human. The project used AI not as a mirror of intelligence or a tool for optimalization, but as a lens for uncovering human qualities that technology still finds hard to reproduce: emotion, memory, and imagination.

Its design strategy focused on how these inner experiences could be expressed and shared through technological means. Participants’ reflections were gathered and reinterpreted through AI to form collective audiovisual portraits – translating the deeply personal into something tangible and communal.

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Human–AI Creativity

What made SAM distinctive was not the generative capacities themselves but the way they were orchestrated into a dramaturgical and collective process. The experience invited participants to see AI not simply as a tool for producing content, but as a partner in externalizing personal and collective inner states, turning them into something ephemeral, meaningful, and shareable.

This approach was made possible by an interdisciplinary team that combined practical philosophy, dramaturgy, and theater-making with creative coding, machine learning, and immersive technology. Philosophical and artistic perspectives informed the kinds of reflections participants were invited to share, while technical expertise enabled those reflections to be interpreted and expressed in real time.

How SAM works

At the center of the experience was a dialogue with SAM, a thoughtful AI companion accessed through each visitor’s phone via QR code. Rather than presenting itself as all-knowing, SAM positioned itself as curious – eager to learn from people about what it means to be human. Participants were invited to share personal reflections on their memories, creativity, values, and hopes, offering fragments of what makes human experience unique. 

These reflections were interpreted in real time through a carefully orchestrated system of generative AI tools. ChatGPT crafted scripts and narration, Stable Diffusion and Stable Video Diffusion generated imagery and motion, and TouchDesigner stitched these elements together into a compelling audiovisual sequence. What began as words on a screen became sound, visuals, and movement – an ephemeral translation of thought into cinematic form. 

The outcome was a single short-lived film for each group, projected onto Nxt Museum’s immersive screen. More than a technical demonstration, each film acted as a mirror of the participants’ shared perspectives, bringing their voices together into a collective portrait of how they understand themselves, and their place in a world increasingly shaped by AI.