nga mihi / best,
Luke
On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 at 22:20, Francis Hunger
<francis.hun...@irmielin.org> wrote:
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
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