(no subject)

[haptalaon]

One facet of the AI art/text thing I keep rolling over in my mind is about...how inconsequential it is for anyone whose entire life isn't spent sitting looking at an interface, and how devastating it is for everybody else.

I'm distressed - really distressed - by the impact AI will have on social media, political discourse, dating apps, the inability to tell if you're talking to a person or an entity any more. It'll clog up the web with nonsense cruft, making simple tasks like searching for a quote, a recipe, a picture, completely meaningless. The internet is the greatest library that has ever been, and it's about to be trashed. Wikipedia, AO3, anyone with a submission form...like the pixel version of those uninhabitable communities in Ghana swamped with unwanted fast fashion from the global north, living and swimming in disposable crap.

(but does it matter that much, really? I already find social media upsetting because it IS NOT LIKE TALKING TO A PERSON, no matter how many people insist I'm wrong about my own perceptions and experiences or assume I'm making a value judgement about how their internet friends are 'fake'. It feels like culture is wildly in denial about this, like the expansion of how many people one can talk to (digitally) in a day but also the profound increase in loneliness - something about the timbre of those connections is off. Crary has a great description of this, he talks about the deadening effect of the interface you use to do your banking and your social life now being indistinguishable, the flattening texture of everything.

There's a sense when I think 'oh no, what if all the people I was talking to online were just robots and pixels????' well, how much would that actually change things if they really were? I saw someone getting harassed on twitter last week after posting thoughts about a film, express themselves in a follow-up tweet by saying:

trying everything possible to communicate that I am an actual person, not a concept or a bunch of pixels with no feelings, because I honestly can’t do this shit again

& I think that's very evocative, and I think people DO treat one another online as a bunch of pixels, there's a very dehumanising quality to it because you are literaly interfacing with soemthing that is NOT human - with words, with fingerpressess, with text boxes. Isn't talking to a robot just business as normal? Maybe it'll be better, they can all harass each other?

[not giving credit to the quote in an attempt to protect this person from more harassment obvs])

At my most morbid, I have some accelerationist feelings about AI: I think it will trash the usefulness of the internet to such an intense extent that we'll have to have a cultural return to non-digital ways of relating and living, like - if you can't trust a person on a dating app is real, then it'll drive a return to the real. I hope! it'll have to, surely, or things will just get steadily more rubbish.

Cards on the table: I like AI art from an aesthetic perspective. They're optimised for popularity! They are more likely to draw from an image source if it's more represented, and call me basic but 'Leyendecker Mucha fantasy art golden hour massive tits' is totally my jam. My fave art movement are like, that Victorian moment of highly realist oil painting with romantic/exoticicisng subject-matter, the pinnacle of both skill and whimsy - and I like pulp, I like pop, I like sensation cinema. My art taste tends towards the populist, obvious and brightly coloured.

& i think it's telling that Leyendecker and Mucha get drawn on so frequently, they're not just good artists but advertising artists - art that's designed for mass appeal and simple, bold imagemaking! Or that MtG art guy, he designs for products! Which is an insight into the taste level of AI adopters as well as what it's going to be used for, to re-represent the known and the comforting and the pleasurable, to describe the world in reassuring ways that make people want to spend money. It's a normativising tool! It is incapable of seeing in new ways!

& like, you can see this in the three most archetypal uses of AI to date. 1. meme AI - gender reveal 9/11, Margaret Thatcher in Robot Wars, Jesus selfie, Marvel Disney princesses - recombining concepts that already exist for quick thrills. That's just an expansion of plumbing everything for retro as described by Simon Reynolds a decade back, there's nothing new there, and it feels tired - it doesn't have the futureshock of remix, it feels stagnant and thoughtless. But fun!

2. corporate hero images. I think this is bad! Making these images is a bullshit job but as Mucha and Leyendecker show, corporate art is a well paid space from which people can develop new ideas and ways of seeing, and everyday design is important! Everyday design is the form of art a person is most likely to encounter and in many ways that makes it more essential than stuff for Art People in art museums. So it's a real shame that this industry is going to go, and like, degrading to the soul too. But AI art has a falsity, and corporations have a falsity too, so there's a match there.

Chat AIs do best at reproducing corporate emails and brochures, because of their inherent falsity (insincerity as well as culturally hollow)! & the people who are most excited about AI are like, white collar workers whose world of work is profoundly meaningless. They see Chat AIs reproducing this text and feel excited because it sounds like a real person! But it feels like being spoken down to by HR, and it's revealing of the paucity of the world in which they live and how distant they are from the physical that this speechform sounds either real or good. The dynamic is one where these people ARE HR or feel protected by HR, rather than being the sort of person harmed by it.

3. busty white women of ambiguously young ages. This is wholly expected: porn is a big technology mover. Video, cinema, photography, the internet, various sites on the internet, all adopted early by porn-makers and bought into by porn-consumers. But it's also expressive of the normativising and fake energy AI brings to the world. 'A desirable woman' is an archetypal consumable commodity, and because AI can only copy from what's already out there as images, then the answer to what 'what do women look like' can only be answered from culture's restrictive desire pool. It accelerates trends that already exist, about how limiting images of desirability are, AI's inability to imagine an actual woman. or, the immediate use of AI to create abuse images of women who didn't choose to be put into porn videos, and the side-effect of harm to the performers whose bodies were used to train the models for those videos.

Like the social media harassment situation, AI fills me with an sense of "this is clearly worse - and yet, is it really different? Or is it just a hyperfocused intensity of a badness that already existed?" It doesn't feel like the future because what about any of this is new? It's just faster.

(NSFW example of what I mean by ambiguously young. The prompt for all these images includes the word 'woman', but how old would you guess any of those cartoon characters actually are? The AI has made this decision about how to interpret the word 'woman' based on what it knows from our visual culture)

I feel like misogyny is such an evocative lens to look at the problems of AI through because: 'what if i could just create an available woman who was optimised for my visual pleasure, and useful for whatever I need' is...a longstanding desire under patriarchy. Or even 'what if I wanted work done, but didn't want to pay someone to do it' - a traditional reason to get a wife or underpay a female employee. & the sort of text Chat GPT it good at producing, all female secretary soft skills, like writing a persuasive letter so you can get on with important man work like Having Ideas and Having Brunches With Key Stakeholders. Chat AIs as Christina Hendricks' character from Mad Men, essentially: write my correspondence AND look great in a pencil-skirt.

& not to be that guy (cus I know 9/10 when men start having reactionary thoughts about porn, the politics are Bad!) but my fears of the anti-physicality of modern life definitely extends to pornographic pictures. I do think a world where people spend so many hours of their life a day looking at images is sinister! Sex is a multi-sensory experience and visuality is only one component, and thats true also of...seeing a landscape or having a conversation with a person, and how insubstantial and insufficient the internet replicas of these experiences are.

Like the video on Death of a Thousand Aesthetics which talk about how the various *core movements are internet consumption brands, not art movements, because they're about establishing identity through which photos you share online, but nobody actually has a vapourwave bedroom or a goblincore kitchen, it's not subculture it's advertising. To be a punk you had to dress like a punk and go to punk parties, not sit at home in your PJs doing unpaid digital labour by reblogging.

(I think a lot about how Fencraft has a distinct visual aesthetic, at least the way I express it, but the thing is...you've not seen my living room. I have intermittent urges to like, create tumblr moodboards to ~advertise~ the vibe, but I think that's degrading and it creates these kinds of desires to exist in the digital I view as basically bad. And my living room looks Just like you imagine it. It's got a spooky old 1930s grandfather clock. It has a carved victorian fireplace from a demolished chapel. It has dolls houses and an organ. It has a tapestry rendition of Constable's Haywain which my husband hates and is so ugly the charity shop gave it to us for free. I put in that work to live inside my fantasy in the physical world.)

Crary has a good phrase about how phone internet creates a disatisfaction because wherever you are, there will always be something funnier, more beautiful, more interesting or more engaging on your phone. & that doesn't seem bad when you are, say, on the bus and it's dull, and yet as a totalising human experience it's life-shifting, it's consciousness shifting. Of course it's bad. of course it's bad. I'm broadly pro-porn, and yet - and yet - I do think there's something corrosive to the soul when human sensuality and eroticism is funneled through image consumption on platforms exactly the same way you scroll pictures of food you'll never eat and pictures of houses you'll never afford and destinations you'll never visit. At times, the internet feels like a nightmare magic spell: to be trapped emotionally within a dimension of shadows, to look but never to touch, to be surrounded by wealth and yet feel you are starving.

But it's also only meaningfully futuresque to internet-tethered people like, I get distressed by the idea of no longer knowing if a face I see is real or not - very intense distress like, actually having an unreality dissociation. But that's only a problem if I'm at my desk. So part of me is like...I don't need to care about this. Any art or text which can be adequately replaced by machine probably deserves to be. I hate everything AI represents, like I experience a profound revulsion which I cannot articulate and cannot be talked out of, and yet...there's a tiredness to it too. Like, do I actually care if the guy in the trainers advert is fake or not? I'm opposed to trainer companies and advertising companies, I'm not emotionally intertwined with them, is it actualy that much worse if the guy is fake and the photo is machine-generated? It's just the next frontier of encroaching crapification of every part of every thing, everything is disposable, nothing has meaning, nothing has value or the sacred.