MARGARET USES AI TO BRING wild IDEAS TO LIFE
Margaret’s video AI work blends the role of director of photography, content creator, and writer. As a trained photographer, a veteran of tech start ups, and a TikTok user, Margaret understands the significance of not just hooking a viewer, but keeping them, and then leaving an impact after they’ve scrolled away.
In a creative practice that is best described as comprehensive and non-exhaustive, Margaret employs multiple tools and platforms (AI and otherwise). She believes that creativity has no formula, and that AI is always a viable medium if it is in service and spirit of a project’s main idea.
Just because “anyone” can make “anything” with AI, doesn’t void the value of artistry—that’s where she comes in.
in 2025, Margaret trained
a custom gpt model
on her teenage diaries.
These videos began with a conversation about happiness and pull both human adult Margaret and AI “Teen Margaret” back to the happy moments recorded in the diaries and in memory.
In the late 2000s, these were places of ease and anonymity, long before the pressure to perform or constantly document life. The animated imagery, developed from their collaborative poems, folds remembered and imagined environments into a visual language that traces the beginnings of Murphy’s photographic eye.
Within contemporary digital culture, the series treats happiness as a brief state in which a person slips out of view and is no longer measured or interpreted. The environments explored through dialogue become counter-images to the systems that increasingly measure daily life, spaces where simply existing rather than performing or documenting is enough.
Through the ongoing exchange between human and machine Margaret, the series, A Happiness Model suggests that self-representation and happiness form across time rather than in a single moment. Earlier versions of the self persist within the technologies that store them, shaping how identity and happiness are understood in the present.
Read more about Margaret and “Teen Margaret.”