Project Duchess

Project Duchess

Project Duchess is an AI transmedia project focused on the bringing to life the work of Margaret Cavendish, the late Duchess of Newcastle-on-Tyne.

Background

Modern AI presents a strong frontier on what is possible with digital technology, but it is strongly being lent towards cryptography, unneccessary commercial ephermalization, when it has shown its strength in artistic, musical, and creative. To this end, Project Duchess seeks to leverage LLMs, text-to-voice, and other computer vision, automation, and natural language processing emerging technologies. In addition to the utility of the current generation of generative artificial intelligence, Project Duchess seeks to marry these technologies with immersive technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality, while exploring the potentials of embodiement as a path to general artificial intelligence (GenAI) with telepresence and robotics. 

Why the Duchess?

In the history of western literature, previous to the 20th century, few women stand out as authors previous to Mary Shelley, few woman authors are known to modern audiences, less so who specialized in what could be called science fiction and the works of academic science. Standing quietly between Shelley and Hypatia is the Lady Cavendish, a stylish and outlandish woman of 17th century England who was unique of her time for publishing 10 known volumes of scientific literature.

In her adult life, she was known for her extravagance, outlandish dress, dislike of microscopes, and witty repartée, but today, at least for us behind Project Duchess, The Blazing World. This text is a....unique exploration of language and ideas that are very distinct for Cavendish, and showcase a mind that sought to explore what a world could be. For this and for enthusiastic lifelong interest in furthering the scientific dialogue of her time, her and her work seemed an appropriate source to draw inspiration from as an any. 

Current Working Experiential Endpoints

Duchess V0.1 on HuggingChat

Duchess V0.1 is structured as as a Huggingface chat assistant that has web capabilities, but is content locked directly to the Project Gutenberg txt files for the Blazing World, Natural Philosophy, and Philosophical Letters. 

This current model is C4AI Command R+ 08-2024. 

AI Ethics Statement, Project Gutenberg/Textual Use

You can find the Project Duchess AI Ethics Statement here. 

This project leverages (and is indebted to the work of Project Gutenberg, and leverages the following texts:

• The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World
• Philosophical Letters: or, modest Reflections upon some Opinions in Natural Philosophy
• Grounds of Natural Philosophy: Divided into Thirteen Parts

Project Duchess Scope of Use of Project Gutenberg Textual Sources

All current use of these texts for Project Duchess from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (PGLAF) fall within our understanding of fair and reasonable use as described by the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg License use. If you have any concerns or questions, please email hello@untitledprojects.io.