peckham-digital-26-open-call

DESCRIPTION (200 words)

Build-a-Bot: take back your tools

A small number of powerful companies now control how most people interact with AI. Their tools are convenient, but not neutral: they are designed to keep you dependent, train on your data, make decisions about what intelligence looks like on your behalf, and consume extraordinary amounts of energy to run infrastructure that primarily serves their own growth.

This workshop is about engaging with this differently. Using Ollama (free, open source software that runs large language models entirely on your own machine) participants will get inside how these systems actually work, and decide for themselves what, if anything, they want to build with that knowledge.

Local implementation opens up possibilities that commercial tools structurally can’t offer. Your AI doesn’t have to be a chat window. It can take other forms, fit other workflows, respond to your actual practice rather than a generalised idea of what a user might need.

Participants will configure a bot with its own persona, purpose, and rules and leave with it running on their own machine, with enough knowledge to keep developing it.

No prior coding experience required. Participants are encouraged to install Ollama before the session.

FACILITATOR STATEMENT

I am a Senior Lecturer on the MSc Creative Computing at UAL’s Creative Computing Institute, and a part-time doctoral researcher. My PhD, titled ‘After Intelligence’, investigates what it means to build AI infrastructure that genuinely supports creative and intellectual practice, rather than standardising it in the image of commercial workflows.

I believe the current moment in AI development is one where the decisions made about who builds these tools, who owns them, and who they serve (and the concentration of power behind those decisions) will have long-term consequences for how we think, learn, and create. My response to that, both as a researcher and a practitioner, has been to build my own: a suite of locally-run AI tools including a supervisor bot, a study companion, and a shared knowledge layer connected to my research notes. These tools run entirely on open source software (Ollama, FastAPI, ChromaDB) and on local hardware, without sending data to commercial servers.

Building them has changed how I understand these AI tools: not as a product to consume but as something that can and should be shaped by the people using it. I want to share that understanding in a practical, hands-on way, particularly with people who are curious about these tools and those who may feel that building their own is beyond them.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

This workshop sits directly within my doctoral research, which asks how AI tools can be built to support thinking and creative practice rather than replace or flatten it. A central argument of that research is that people should be able to understand, own, and modify the AI systems they use, and that building your own is one of the most powerful ways to develop that understanding and resist the commercial AI infrastructures of power that now surround us.

Running this workshop at Peckham Digital would be the first time I have tested this pedagogical framework in a community setting outside the university. The audience, creative practitioners, technologists, and curious people of all abilities, would be exactly the context I need to understand how these ideas and tools translate beyond an academic environment.

The observations and feedback from the session will feed directly into a larger project I am developing: DIY Bot: a modular framework for building personalised AI tools, explored through both physical and digital dimensions, as a teaching and learning project. Peckham Digital would be its first pilot.

Delivering the workshop will also push me to make the technical scaffold genuinely accessible, which requires a clarity of design and communication that will strengthen both my teaching practice and my wider research outputs.