Hi Brian,
On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 3:55 AM Francis Hunger
<francis.hun...@irmielin.org> wrote:
While some may argue that generated text and images will save time
and money for businesses, a data ecological view immediately
recognizes a major problem: AI feeds into AI. To rephrase it:
statistical computing feeds into statistical computing. In using
these models and publishing the results online we are beginning to
create a loop of prompts and results, with the results being fed
into the next iteration of the cultural snapshots. That’s why I
call the early cultural snapshots still uncontaminated, and I
expect the next iterations of cultural snapshots will be contaminated.
Francis, thanks for your work, it's always totally interesting.
Your argumentation is impeccable and one can easily see how positive
feedback loops will form around elements of AI-generated (or perhaps
"recombined") images. I agree, this will become untenable, though I'd
be interested in your ideas as to why. What kind of effects do you
foresee, both on the level of the images themselves and their reception?
Foresight is a difficult field, as most estimates can extrapolate
maximum 7 year into the future and there are a lot of independent
factors (such as e.g. OpenAI, the producer of CLIP could go bankrupt etc.).
It's worth considering that similar loops have been in place for
decades, in the area of market research, product design and
advertising. Now, all of neoclassical economics is based on the
concept of "consumer preferences," and discovering what consumers
prefer is the official justification for market research; but it's
clear that advertising has attempted, and in many cases succeeded, in
shaping those preferences over generations. The preferences that
people express today are, at least in part, artifacts of past
advertising campaigns. Product design in the present reflects the
influence of earlier products and associated advertising.
That's an great and interesting argument. Because it plays into the
cultural snapshot idea.
Obviously Language wise, people already use translation tools, such as
Deepl and translate Text from German to English and back to German in
order to profit off the "clarity" and "orthographic correction" brought
by the statistical analysis that feeds into the translator and seems to
straighten the German text. We see the same stuff appearing for products
like text editors and thus widely employed for cultural production.
That's one example. Automated forum posts using GPT-3, for instance on
Reddit are another, because we know that the CLIP Model also partly
build on Reddit posts.
Another example is images generated using diffusion models and prompts
building on cultural snapshots and being used as _cheap_ illustrations
for editorial products, feeding off stock photography and to a certain
extend replacing stock photography. This is more or less an economic
motivation with cultural consequences. The question is what changes,
when there is not sufficiently 'original' stock photography circulating,
but the majority is syntheticly generated? Maybe others want to join in,
to speculate about it.
We could further look into 1980s HipHop or 1990s Drum'n Bass sample
culture, which for instance took (and some argue: stole) one particular
sound break, the Amen Break, from an obscure 1969 Soul music record by
The Winston Brothers and build a whole cultural genre from it. Cf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break Here the sample was refined
over time, with generations of musicians cleaning the sample
(compression, frequencies, deverbing, etc.) and providing many
variations of it, then reusing it, because later generation did not
build on the original sample, but on the published versions of it.
We can maybe distinguish two modi operandi where a) "the cultural
snapshot" is understood as an automated feedback loop, operating on a
large scale, mainly through automated scraping and publication of the
derivates of data, amplifying the already most visible representations
of culture and b) "the cultural snapshot" is a feedback loop with many
creative human interventions, be it through curatorial selection, prompt
engineering or intended data manipulation.
Blade Runner vividly demonstrated this cultural condition in the early
1980s, through the figure of the replicants with their implanted
memories.
I dont know if I get your point. I'd always say that Blade Runner is a
cultural imaginary, one of the many phantasms about the machinisation of
humans since at least 1900 if not earlier, and that's an entirely
different discussion then. I would avoid this as an metaphor.
The intensely targeted production of postmodern culture ensued, and
has been carried on since then with the increasingly granular market
research of surveillance capitalism, where the calculation of
statistically probable behavior becomes a good deal more precise. The
effect across the neoliberal period has been, not increasing
standardization or authoritarian control, but instead, the
rationalized proliferation of customizable products, whose patterns of
use and modification, however divergent or "deviant" they may be, are
then fed back into the design process. Not only the "quality of the
image" seems to degrade in this process. Instead, culture in general
seems to degrade, even though it also becomes more inclusive and more
diverse at the same time.
When looking for a plausible scenario regarding synthetic text and
synthetic images, Steve Bannons “The real opposition is the media. And
the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” is sadly a
good candidate. This ties in with what Ganaele Langlois posits:
„Therefore: communicative fascism posts that what is real is the
opposite of social justice, and we now see the armies of ‚Social
Injustice Warriors‘ as Sarah Sharma (2019) calls them, busy typing
away at their keyboards to defend the rights to keep their fear of
Others unchallenged and to protect their bigotry, misogyny, and
racism from being debunked as inept constructions of themselves“
Langlois 2021:3
„The first aspect of this new communicative fascism is related to
what can be called ‚real fakes_ that is to say, the construction of
a fictional and alternative reality where the paranoid position of
fear and rage can find some validation … Real fakes are about what
reality ought to be: they are virtual backgrounds on which fascists
can find their validity and raising’être.“ Langlois 2021:3f
So this is to be expected both for political or consumer marketing purposes.
AI is poised to do a lot of things - but one of them is to further
accelerate the continual remaking of generational preferences for the
needs of capitalist marketing. Do you think that's right, Francis?
That's one possible reading. I would insist, to not use an active verb
with AI however, rephrasing your point towards "AI may be used for a lot
of things". Better even replace 'AI' with the term 'statistical
computation'.
Currently I would read 'AI' as a mixture of imaginations and phantasms
about automation, of which some may become true – just in another way
from what was expected or promoted. For certain, the inner logics of
capital circulation command to deploy statistical computation to replace
living, human labor. We already see how the job description of
translators changes towards an human–statistical_computation
entanglement and how the repetetive parts of the illustrator job, like
coloring get automated away and put people out of jobs and it is
plausible to expect the consolidation of jobs like photo editor, news
editor, author with prompt-engineering. Since we are concentrating on
the cultural sphere here, I'll limit the examples to this field. Human
Labor in production, logistics, care labor would need their own thoughts.
What other consequences do you see? And above all, what to do in the
face of a seemingly inevitable trend?
We are going to create separate data ecologies, which prohibit spamming
the data space. These would be spaces, comparable to the no-photo-policy
in clubs like Berghain or IFZ with a no-synthetics policy. While vast
areas of the information space may be indeed flooded, these would be
valuable zones of cultural exchange. (The answer would be much longer
indeed, but we're not writing a book here).
best, Brian
--
Researcher at Training The Archive, HMKV Dortmund
Artistic Practicehttp://www.irmielin.org
Ph.D. at Bauhaus University Weimarhttp://databasecultures.irmielin.org
Daily Tweetshttps://twitter.com/databaseculture
Peter and Irene Ludwig guest professorship at the Hungarian University of Fine
Arts in Budapest 2022/23
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
# @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: