Interesting essay Francis, and always appreciate Brian's thoughtful
comments. I think the historical angle Brian is pointing towards is
important as a way to push against the claims of AI models as somehow
entirely new or revolutionary.
In particular, I want to push back against this idea that this is the
last 'pure' cultural snapshot available to AI models, that future
harvesting will be 'tainted' by automated content.
Francis' examples of hip hop and dnb culture, with sampling at their
heart, already starts to point to the problems with this statement.
Culture has always been a project of cutting and splicing,
appropriating, transforming, and remaking existing material. It's funny
that AI commentators like Gary Marcus talk about GPT-3 as the 'king of
pastiche'. Pastiche is what culture does. Indeed, we have whole genres
(the romance novel, the murder mystery, etc) that are about reproducing
certain elements in slightly different permutations, over and over again.
This is not a recent or purely digital phenomenon. I remember going to a
show at the Neue Nationalgalerie, where oil paintings repeatedly
reproduced the identical bird in different positions. "A variety of
painting styles suggests the involvement of a number of assistants and
several motifs can be repeatedly found in an unaltered form in many of
his paintings. D’Hondecoeter’s oeuvre consequently appears as a
conglomeration of decorative collages, produced in an almost mechanical
seriality on the basis of successful formulas." Copy, paste, repeat.
Unspoken in this claim of machines 'tainting' or 'corrupting' culture is
the idea of authenticity. It really reminds me of the moral panic
surrounding algorithmic news and platform-driven disinformation, where
pundits lamented the shift from truth to 'post-truth.' This is not to
suggest that misinformation is not an issue, nor that veracity doesn't
matter (i.e. Rohingya and Facebook). But the premise of some halcyon age
of truth prior to the digital needs to get wrecked. Yes, Large language
models and other AI technologies do introduce new conditions, generating
truth claims rapidly and at scale. But rather than hand-wringing about
'fake news,' it's more productive to see how they splice together
several truth theories (coherence, consensus, social construction, etc)
into new formations. I'm currently writing a paper precisely on this
issue with a couple of colleagues.
nga mihi / best,
Luke
On Tue, 20 Dec 2022 at 22:20, Francis Hunger
<francis.hun...@irmielin.org <mailto:francis.hun...@irmielin.org>> wrote:
Hi Brian,
On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 3:55 AM Francis Hunger
<francis.hun...@irmielin.org <mailto: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
<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 <http://www.irmielin.org>
Ph.D. at Bauhaus University Weimarhttp://databasecultures.irmielin.org
<http://databasecultures.irmielin.org>
Daily Tweetshttps://twitter.com/databaseculture
<https://twitter.com/databaseculture>
Peter and Irene Ludwig guest professorship at the Hungarian University of
Fine Arts in Budapest 2022/23
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