Judith Deschamps’ PhD is supervised by Arnaud Regnauld, Professor of literature at TransCrit, University of Paris 8, and Laurence Devillers,Professor of AI and ethics at LISN-CNRS.

Judith Deschamps is a multidisciplinary artist undertaking a practice-based PhD at the Research School ArTeC, University Paris 8/10. Entitled Finitude et Sublimation : l’IA en fin de vie, this multidisciplinary thesis project examines the role that co-creation with AI can play in assisting elderly people and in facing the passage from life to death. By exploring the interconnections of technological evolution with a long history of body sublimations, it aims to develop a "sublimatory" artistic process that addresses the imaginations and physical transformations associated with the end-of-life. Through theology since Plato, alchemy in the Middle Ages, psychoanalysis in the 20th century and computation in the 21st century, sublimation considers the mind’s separation from its bodily anchorage. Rooted in this tradition of thought, AIs do not acknowledge the evolving reality of the human body or the diversity of other sensibilities, like those of the elderly. AIs find themselves deprived of an entire imagination that is necessary for the acceptance of old age and death in society. Through a series of writing workshops using clay and an artificial text generator (based on GPT), people living in a nursing home are invited to produce a textual and sound artwork, intended to be later exhibited in art centres. Essential to the development of an ethical awareness of the end-of-life, a sensory approach to technology is engaged, allowing the appropriation of AI by elderly people. Through this non-oppositional perspective, AI takes into account the bodily dimension of the human being and breaks free from body/mind and human/machine dualities. It proposes a collaborative, spiritual and artistic alternative to purely technological solutionism.