Quotes from things I'm reading online, more or less in real time. Started in 2023. Quotes from readings 2021-22 can be found in this Google doc
Caroline Busta, Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content, in Document, Issue 24, May 29, 2024
Rather than functioning as the carrier of information or meaning, the “content” has become, instead, a conductor of energy, affect, “vibes.”
What if, in a time of infinity-content, a meta reading of the shape and feel of content has become a survival skill? The ability to intuit a viable meaning via surface-level qualities—ones that are neither text nor image but a secret third thing—is now essential for negotiating our sprawling information space. Perhaps we’re tapping into a more primal human intelligence.
Per the contract of the platform economy, the job of content in algorithmically determined spaces is to conduct the attention, if not also behavior, of a network. In turn, factuality, originality, and style matter less than where and how content circulates and what kind of meaning its recipients can read (or hallucinate) into it.
Creative agency is now located either further upstream in programming platforms [...] and/or further downstream via receiving users [...] This is the reason figures such as Virgil Abloh, Anne Imhof, Demna, and Ye have been among the most influential artists and cultural creators of the past decade—less for what they originated than what they distilled and repositioned in the stream.
what if we thought about generative AI more as an expression of an epochal shift in human communication than a root cause? What if there’s something deeper, older, even organically emergent that has been nudging us to perceive and communicate in a fundamentally different way and “machine learning neural networks” are, rather, answering that call?
the internet itself now senses us, re-encoding all content that flows through it, processing every product launch, policy change, and TV series, as well as our every utterance in response into mathematically precise, high-dimensional representations.
when we consider the degree to which the technology of writing contributed to our linear understanding of time, why wouldn’t this age of neural media enable us to experience time differently?
Isabella Haid, Digital Ruination and the Memetic Lifecycle, in Do Not Research, August 12, 2024
when we log online, we willfully situate ourselves inside of a ruinous landscape. We are accustomed to the horror of nothing to be seen: navigating broken webpages or abandoned servers has become a coming of age ritual.
Twisted by a culture of obsolescence and seized by the fragmentation of the Internet, networked activity is a confrontation with ruin.
Memes are the rubble of the ruined digital landscape. That is to say, they are raw, chaotic material that can be mobilized to create new forms and meanings [...] Unlike conventional theories of ruin, which speak of picturesque collapse and show little interest in the mess which remains, rubble-ruin seeks to destabilize this “hierarchy of debris” in regard to digital ruins. In turn, the memetic life cycle has no stable point of origin, author, or context. The dust and debris which litter the Internet [...] are the raw material for memes. At the peak of their popularity and after we’ve all stopped laughing, memes, too, are like rubble. I say dust and debris to denote the observer’s effect on memes: like particles being observed, the human agent necessarily changes the matter itself. This is also to say that they do not arrest agency, but are part of the assemblage of nonhuman components across which agency is distributed in the making of a digital avatar. Like us, from dust they are made and to dust they will once return.
Memes are the only cultural ephemera capable of keeping up with neoliberal networked time.
What is surprising is not that digital media fades but rather that it stays at all. (Wendy Chun)
Anthony Korner, Aurora Musicalis, in Artforum, SUMMER 1986, VOL. 24, NO. 10
What’s happened in music in the last thirty years is that new instruments have been continuously invented, almost daily. There are now electronic machines that make the sounds of new musical instruments [...] And then there are the recording studios, where you can take finite sounds and treat them as if their parameters were infinite.
To me, art is a transaction between somebody and something rather than the quality of an object. When we engage in this transaction we let down certain psychic defenses, allow ourselves to become party to something that we don’t completely understand—an emotional power or an intellectual power that we lose ourselves in.
Peckham says that to endure uncertainty is an acquired skill, and that what art does is rehearse people in enduring uncertainty.
One of the motives for being an artist is to recreate a condition where you’re actually out of your depth, where you’re uncertain, no longer controlling yourself, yet you’re generating something, like surfing as opposed to digging a tunnel. Tunnel-digging activity is necessary, but what artists like, if they still like what they’re doing, is the surfing.
Art21, Interview. “Celebration Park”. Pierre Huyghe, in Art21, August 2024
You used to be able to have a narrative and circulate it through a narrator, and the story would grow and go on indefinitely. But today, you cannot do that because there’s a copyright attached to it. The story can expand, but it always has to go back to the original because of the copyright issue. Between us, we can sing the song of Snow White, but not publicly. This is about the circulation of stories—how we can tell stories to each other, how fluid or not this is.
Ben Davis, Can A.I. Make You Creative? Yes—But There’s a Cost, in Artnet News, August 14, 2024
The technology pushes towards monoculture. And as in agriculture, monoculture improves efficiency at the cost of diversity, with effects for the larger environment.
As a tool for play or artistic exploration in a free environment, you can probably get very interesting things out of A.I. But when its use case is speed-up and cheapening the cost of training workers, the homogenizing effects on creativity seem highly likely.
Joshua Rothman, 'Are We Living in the Age of Info-Determinism?, in The New Yorker, August 13, 2024
“Every expert is surrounded by a horde of amateurs eager to pounce on every mistake and mock every unsuccessful prediction or policy,” Gurri wrote. And yet, “the public opposes, but does not propose.” Demolishing ideas is easy in a subreddit; crafting new ones there is mostly beside the point.
As the powerful and the public came to regard one another with contempt, they created “a perpetual feedback loop of failure and negation,” Gurri wrote. Nihilism—“the belief that the status quo is so abhorrent that destruction will be a form of progress”—became widespread.
How can a society function when the rejection of knowledge becomes a political act?
We live cocooned by culture, experiencing reality through a cultural prism. [...] Until very recently, the cultural cocoon we lived in was woven by other humans. Going forward, it will be increasingly designed by computers. (Yuval Noah Harari)
Call it info-determinism: the belief that the ways that information flows through the world are actually a kind of web in which we’re ensnared.
The digital had not so much changed that as made it too obvious to ignore. (William Gibson)
Stephanie Bailey, "Cory Arcangel: ‘If I was 24, I’d be in some NFT collective’", in Ocula, 29 July 2024
I think partly what you see in the art market right now is related to the Instagram algorithm. For all the poor conceptual artists whose work doesn't photograph well, it's a visibility disaster.
Because you can have multiple versions, you could theoretically never be done with anything.
From the perspective of my generation, the huge issue or opportunity to solve in the early 2000s was how to make digital work that was legible to people who were not digital natives. A big part of my project at that time was to figure out how to make work that could be read as art to people who were not interested in digital art.
Eryk Salvaggio, "I Was a Teenage Net Artist", in Cybernetic Forests, July 28, 2024
AI is the last internet art project. It is the most recent formulation of the exchange of information online, because it was built upon that exchange. Moving forward, the Web will reflect the garbled output of itself in ways that radically transform that exchange.
Max Kozloff, "THE MULTIMILLION DOLLAR ART BOONDOGGLE", in Artforum, OCTOBER 1971, VOL. 10, NO. 2
Such cybernetics-orientated art pays tribute to certain elderly ideas of progress in that it feels beholden to keep in step with fast-paced science. But since it is thoroughly elitist, upholding no values other than the tedious complication of its engineering, or the amorphous spread of “information,” it had to downgrade the Utopianism that kept the techno-euphoria of some earlier modern art in thrall.
The permissive atmosphere in the art world, that which licenses and sanctions the artist’s most extravagant conceits, evaporates as soon as his context is changed to one where men are supposed to be doing things seriously and for purpose.
the type of artist infatuated with technical process would be all the more encouraged, through force of bias, to the sensational, to art as short term entertainment or mystification. Between the option of getting technology out of sight and making it extremely manifest, his choice was clear. He had no vocabulary or style to compromise, but also no point of view to propose or express.
artists are hardly exceptionable, no more than the rest of us, in being entangled in a thousand everyday complicities with the destructiveness of the American war machine. But there exists a huge difference, that does not require a fine measure, between those involuntary dependencies that will endure short of total boycott or revolution, and active, knowing connivance, freely entered into without pressure or need.
Alex Hern and Dan Milmo, "Spam, junk … slop? The latest wave of AI behind the ‘zombie internet’", in The Guardian, May 19, 2024
“Slop” is what you get when you shove artificial intelligence-generated material up on the web for anyone to view [...] it functions mostly to create the appearance of human-made content, benefit from advertising revenue and steer search engine attention towards other sites.
But like spam, its overall effect is negative: the lost time and effort of users who now have to wade through slop to find the content they’re actually seeking far outweighs the profit to the slop creator.
Ben Davis, "‘The Photo’ and Its Aftermath", in Artnet News, July 19, 2024
"As an image, Evan Vucci’s photograph has huge mythological power. But what is the content of the myth, if you actually unpack it?
The literal meaning is of a bloodied Trump yelling “fight!” to supporters after nearly being killed. That’s what it denotes. As for what it connotes [...] the immediate political situation is the content of the myth."
Haruki Murakami, "Kaho", in The New Yorker, July 1, 2024
"nowadays people severely attack lookism. Most people loudly denounce beauty contests. Say the words ‘ugly woman’ in public and you’ll get beaten up. But check out TV. And magazines. They’re full of ads for cosmetics, plastic surgery, and spa treatments. No matter how you look at it, it’s a ridiculous, meaningless double standard. A farce, really."
"being sick can also be enjoyable. Sick people have their own special place that only sick people can enjoy. Like a Disneyland for the disturbed."
Alex Quicho, "The Gore Layer", in Spike, 5 July 2024
" In 1948, Swiss historian Sigfried Giedion was already writing of how death is found “in the washing machine, the fridge, canned meat, the sink and the vacuum cleaner. That is, death could be found in every domestic object that helped distance people from abject organic matter and hazards that they might otherwise have to deal with.”"
"“Sensitive content,"’ hidden by default, implies an insensitive viewer; the blur a literal vellum between user-generated fictions and brutal events."
"Death, not the semiconductor, is the foundational material of techno-culture. Suicidal factory workers, mutilated mineral miners, traumatized content moderators – not to mention the soldier-cum-gangster who broadcasts his acts of killing: Our slippery digital playgrounds derive energy from spilled blood, and cash in by packaging it as entertainment."
"Without a doubt, our world is a decorated hell."
Bogna Konior, "L’EROTISMO INUMANO DELL’IA", in Notzine #2, giugno 2024
"nella mistica e nella teologia cristiana le donne – e non si tratta di eretiche o figure controverse, ma di sante della Chiesa cattolica – hanno scritto per secoli di erotismo inumano, di riproduzione asessuale e di innumerevoli pratiche erotiche che esaltano tutto ciò che è “innaturale” e “artificiale”. Lungi dall’esserne detrattrici, sono le profetesse dell’ordine dell’intelligenza artificiale e della società ibrida uomo-macchina che verrà."
"Se c’è qualcosa di inumano che entra nell’ordine umano, lo si rintraccia nel femminile, che già figura nel database come un oggetto."
"Attraverso il chatbot, capiamo che forse sono proprio le cose come il linguaggio e il desiderio, e quindi la nostra stessa soggettività, tutti quegli elementi che pensavamo fossero i più umani in noi, ad essere in realtà “artificiali”, automatizzati, pre-costruiti da forze esterne, o animaleschi, incontrollabili, “irragionevoli”."
Evan Moffitt, "Get Real", in Eyebeam, September 21, 2023
"If artificial intelligence is treated as an artistic medium autonomous from the systems that support and disseminate it, its criticality will be stunted by the capitalist structures upon which it depends, in turn reinforcing our passive acceptance of inequality. Creating a world beyond such conditions will require building programs that look nothing like anything we’ve ever seen before. Art, more than anything, ought to be able to restore our faith in the power of the human imagination to envision radical alternatives."
Lai Yi Ohlsen, "How Tall is the Internet?", in e-flux Architecture, Spatial Computing, June 2024
"The systemic reasons that 42 million Americans do not have access to the internet are likely related to the systemic reasons that 26 million Americans do not have healthcare, but these subtleties cannot be revealed by counting how many seconds it takes for a packet to be sent across the network. Just as it would be inconclusive to study capitalism from a purely economic perspective, or urban planning from a purely architectural lens, analysis of the internet should enrich and nourish a rigorous use of internet measurement data in other fields. "
Mimi Ọnụọha, "The End of a World / As We Knew It", in e-flux Architecture, Spatial Computing, June 2024
"The unknowable is not disruption for disruption’s sake. To understand the unknowable, you must abandon the comforting fantasy of facts and information as things that can be picked up or put down like boxes of cereal on a grocery shelf. You must be willing to entertain the idea that knowing is not so straightforward. It can be a murky, quiet, loud, shadowy, difficult, contradictory process. To understand the unknowable, you have to shift your focus away from information and towards the knowers. What you know defines what you cannot know. What you have internalized to the point of naturalizing—the kind of knowledge that infuses your whole life, self, and orienting structure—defines what you cannot know."
"The unknowable is all of the information that, although it isn’t hidden, cannot be acknowledged or assimilated due to the contradictions it poses to the fundamental precepts upon which your system of knowledge rests."
Sarah Moroz, "Disordered Attention. Sarah Moroz in conversation with Claire Bishop", in Dirt, June 7, 2024
"I want to be realistic about how the mind works today, which is on multiple streams. And this situation isn’t going to change. We can set up full attention as an ideal, but our digital devices are producing a different way of attending."
"my assessment of a work tends not to be made in the moment, but after a few days, when I ask myself: what lingers?"
"technology isn’t going away, so we need to figure out how to live with it healthily, ethically, politically, environmentally. I admire people who can disconnect, but that’s a privilege not many have access to."
"I think attention’s prioritization of the optical is already waning in favor of alternative modes of being-in-common, reflected in the rise of a discourse of ‘care’ in contemporary art and performance,,, The fear that I had ten years ago, that museums would basically become selfie stadia, has not really happened because apps like Snapchat now offer so many great backdrops."
Claire Bishop, "Disordered Attention", in Burlington Contemporary, 20.06.2024
"Today, documentation is in the hands of every viewer, not just the professional hired photographer. As a result, the hierarchies of distribution have been scrambled. This has changed the dynamic of looking at art and especially performance. The work is less self-important, less total; it grants us the space to be mobile and social, to react, chat, share and archive as we watch."
"One of my arguments is that the effects of digital technology upon spectatorship are best seen in art that, at first glance, seems to reject digital technology most forcefully – for example, in performances that emphasise live presence, or installations that harness obsolete technology."
"I want to push back against this association between meaning and profundity, or what I call a depth model of culture. While some cultural objects have longevity and seem timeless, others are slight but have the virtue of being timely and provoking intense debate... The depth model of culture has been rocked by the rise of digital technology. Memes and the viral have put a new model of engaged looking into circulation, predicated on quantity and speed rather than narrowness and depth. Modern spectatorship, premised on fully focused presence and deep attention, no longer seems appropriate or necessary.4 This is not to say that we should abandon contemplation and automatically celebrate the fast feed. My point is that today’s ways of seeing are not just so much dispersed and distributed as incessantly hybrid"
"technology (including digital technology) is not a discrete unit that ‘impacts’ the work of art, the artist or the viewer. Technology as exteriority would presume a pure and essential concept of human nature. Instead, we are entwined with our technological objects as prostheses."
Kyle Chayka, "Apple Is Bringing A.I. to Your Personal Life, Like It or Not", in The New Yorker, 19 giugno 2024
"The A.I.technology that Apple is demonstrating may not be the most powerful out there, but itsends a powerful message that A.I. belongs in every corner of our lives... On one level, we may feel relieved to seamlessly automate some details of our cluttered lives away. But doing so means relinquishing control over the most basic units of human communication."
Alex Estorick, "ON NET.ART, POSTINTERNET, AND CRYPTOART. Vuk Ćosić, Marisa Olson, Auriea Harvey, and Jason Bailey discuss the changing language of digital art with Alex Estorick", in Right Click Save, June 3, 2024
"I believe that, for the first generation of the early ’90s and for my group that came about a bit later in 1994 or ’95, the motivation was absolute autonomy... Our motive was to stay away deliberately from the art system and the art market because we thought that they were damaging to sublime artistic practices and high ideals. For us, everything else was a sell-out... We were purists who held to this idea of our own continent where you run and run and, as the first one, you look back and see your traces all the way to the horizon. That was the beauty and the adrenaline rush, and it lasted for a very brief period of time" Vuk Ćosić
"For me, there was something that overlapped all of those projects that wasn’t about art-world artists using technology, which we’ve had for a long time. Yes, there is an aesthetic maybe where you could say that they were leaning into memes. But it was really the social experiment of radical inclusivity, removal of curation to an extreme, and an emphasis on participation rather than skill or ability. CryptoArt was about building an altruistic, utopian, decentralized alternative to the traditional art market." (Jason Bailey)
Kevin Buist, "Keeping Time", in Outland, June 17, 2024
"We can think of the blockchain primarily as a kind of clock. Bitcoin and other blockchains are stores of value, but they cannot store value without first delineating and recording time... the “double-spending problem,” the threat of one piece of digital currency being sent to two destinations at once, is solved by a shared chronology of transactions, stored publicly on a peer-to-peer network, verified by a ridiculous number of computers solving big math problems."
"Technology exists to solve problems, while art exists to create them. The challenge for artists working with the blockchain is to make organic, unruly work in the context of the technological solutionism that undergirds the crypto movement."
"If we achieve what technology seems to be after, we might find that the result would make us less human."
Maria Paula Fernandez, Simon Denny, and Adina Glickstein, "On Building", 2022. In JPG100, February 26, 2024
" the question of who – or what – “invented” NFTs is less important than the ecosystem that facilitated their development, and the recognition that their underlying infrastructure was produced through a process of hacking and ad-hoc iteration: communities, networks, and artists taking the responsibility to create new tools into their own hands."
"The infrastructural innovation that enabled NFTs – and the cascade of hyperstructures that they have made possible – is a polyphonic history, its hacker protagonists continually shaping the ever-expanding field."
Benjamin Bratton, "The Five Stages Of AI Grief", in Noema, JUNE 20, 2024
"“Alignment” toward “human-centered AI” are just words representing our hopes and fears related to how AI feels like it is out of control — but also to the idea that complex technologies were never under human control to begin with."
"Sigmund Freud used the term “Copernican” to describe modern decenterings of the human from a place of intuitive privilege. After Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin, he nominated psychoanalysis as the third such revolution. He also characterized the response to such decenterings as “traumas.” ... What is today called “artificial intelligence” should be counted as a Copernican Trauma in the making. It reveals that intelligence, cognition, even mind (definitions of these historical terms are clearly up for debate) are not what they seem to be, not what they feel like, and not unique to the human condition."
" human intelligence is not what human intelligence thought it was all this time. It is both something we possess but which possesses us even more. It exists not just in individual brains, but even more so in the durable structures of communication between them, for example, in the form of language... It also extends to much larger aggregations, of which each of us is a part, and also an instance. There is no reason to believe that the story would or should end with us; eschatology is useless. The evolution of intelligence does not peak with one terraforming species of nomadic primates."
Silvio Lorusso, "Deepdreaming Willy Wonka: AI Weird as the New Kitsch". Transcript of a talk given at the Hidden Layers conference on the 14th of June, 2024.
"the activity which comes the closest to synthetic image generation is neither painting, nor photography, nor photo editing, but image search. The practices are similar: both involve entering a string of text and a few parameters. Moreover, one activity flows into the other: what is the generative act if not an immense, probabilistic image search?"
"AI artists try to persuade themselves and other that what they are doing is probing the limits of the medium, when in truth the medium (read: those who program and feed it) purposely pre-packages the weird. Unsurprisingly, -weird is a built-in Midjourney parameter, therefore an option, a style among others."
"When everything feels like it doesn’t belong, it’s because it is us that actually don’t. The kitsch-man gives way to the man as kitsch."
Katie White, "Pipilotti Rist Is Still Toying With the Fabric of Reality", in Artnet News, May 29, 2024
"aren’t our minds the ultimate vessels for images, swirling with echoes of the past and glimpses of the impossible(?)" Pipilotti Rist
Adam Schrader, "A Photographer Wins a Top Prize in an A.I. Competition for His Non-A.I. Image", in Artnet News, June 14, 2024
“After seeing recent instances of A.I.-generated imagery outshining actual photos in competitions, it occurred to me that I could twist this story inside down and upside out the way only a human could and would, by submitting a real photo into an A.I. competition.”
James Bridle, "Is Creativity Over?", in Wepresent, February 20, 2023
we tend to see AI as an opponent: a competitor with, rather than a collaborator in, our own hopes and desires.
“creativity,” like intelligence, is not something which occurs in a vacuum, or in a single mind. Rather, it is an emergent property of encounters, experiences, materials, and relationships—only some of them identifiably “human,” and many of them non-human and entirely constructed. The luminescence of an Early Renaissance fresco by Fra Angelico owes as much to red cochineal bugs, tempera from hen’s eggs, the fur of his sable brushes, lapis lazuli from the mines of Afghanistan, and ecclesiastical fashion and historical taste as it does to the inspiration of the individual. Creativity has always been a social, interpersonal, and interspecies phenomenon. What we call human art is revolutionized over and over again by the intercession of non-human being and materiality, from oil paints to silver halide photography.
Intelligence flowers everywhere, and thus there is really no such thing as “artificial” intelligence, even in machines. What we call “artificial” intelligence is just another instance of this going on together, as much a part of the “natural” world as oceans and oak galls, mushrooms, mitochondria, and machines made from long-dead sea creatures. “Artificial” and human intelligence, and the creativity which flow from them, are not, and should not be perceived as being, in competition with one another, but are equally fascinating and valuable ways of exploring and making sense of the world.
it turned out that in many instances the combination of human and computer program was more powerful than any machine acting alone: a testament to the power of co-operation over competition, which should give the lie to the oppositional thinking so ingrained in our relationships with AI. One name for this type of play is “centaur” chess: the melding of human forms of creativity and ingenuity with radically different forms of intelligence: mythological, non-human, and machinic.
Refik Anadol, Casey Reas, Michelle Kuo, Paola Antonelli, "Modern Dream: How Refik Anadol Is Using Machine Learning and NFTs to Interpret MoMA’s Collection", in MoMA Magazine, Nov 15, 2021
when I think about these GANs, I don’t think about them as intelligent in the way that something has consciousness; I think of them the way that the body or even an organ like the liver is intelligent. They’re processing information and permuting it and moving it into some other state of reality. [Casey Reas]
Like many creators, artists, designers, I feel like I am trying to find ways to connect memories with the future. And it’s not too hard to imagine, for example, that this specific data universe is the entire representation of every single data point that ever existed in the MoMA archive. And they’re all connected, based on their similarities, by the most cutting-edge, recent algorithms. But, of course, this data never comes in this form; there are certain parameters that artists are still giving reasons for machines to connect. For this unique AI training process, we’ve been experimenting with a learning rate, known as a hyperparameter, that I think has a major creative impact on Hallucinations. And it’s not fully autonomous; meaning, for example, with the color, or the interconnectedness between the data points, in the images we’ve created, there are also many supervised parameters that make the final form. There’s a collaboration between machine and human. With the same data, we can generate infinite versions of the same sculpture, but choosing this moment, and creating this moment in time and space, is the moment of creation. [Refik Anadol]
the process is that researchers, either in industry or in academia, will develop new techniques, new code, will post them as open source onto GitHub and then artists appropriate that, and then move in different directions with it. And in research, the goal is always fidelity. It’s always realism. But for example, what Refik was doing with this work is he stopped training early, because he wanted it to be going more toward abstraction. [Casey Reas]
James Vincent, "Do Chatbots Dream of AI Poetry? Calvino, Madness and Machine Literature", in Faber, May 17, 2024
can artificial intelligence produce art? Like real art? Like really? Yes, is my response – but only when it goes mad.
The literature machines we’ve built today, AI chatbots known as large language models or LLMs, are not merely surrounded by hidden ghosts of the individual and society but are built from them and speak in their tongues. Yes, these systems are used to produce swathes of bland, semi-language – meaningless pap that is not only not good but is actively corrosive to the business of thinking – but they’re also capable, as any combinatorial mechanism can be, human or otherwise, of insight and revelation. They produce this more by error than intent, and in a procedure that requires human curation and intervention, but such machines – the AI language models that are being seeded in our great sea of digital text – can shock us, if we let them.
The use of probability to predict words is the source of these models’ strength and weakness, enabling a number of surprising abilities that are captured to some degree by what is probable in the training data... But this approach also leads to LLMs’s greatest shortcoming: the generation of bullshit. These systems simply make up information with incredible fluidity simply because they have no fixed database of ‘facts’ to refer to. All they can do, for better or worse, is generate words that sound likely to come next.
Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, "Is This the Start of a New NFT Boom?", in Artnet, May 24, 2024
“NFT is a dirty word right now,” said Feral File’s co-founder, Sean Mosovich.
Erik Salvaggio, "Nobody Can Save Us From Imagination," in Cybernetic Forest, May 19, 2024
Artificial General Intelligence doesn’t currently exist. It might exist, someday, but we don’t know when. We are also so far away from realizing it that we still don’t know if it is possible. To assume that AGI will exist, you have to assume that the capacities of Large Language Models will continue to scale at exponential rates; you would have to assume that we can quantify enough information about a complex world into data-driven formats; and that there are enough material resources to build and sustain the computational infrastructure that drives it. You would also have to assume that Large Language Models are the key to unlocking a general intelligence: that if a computer can manipulate language, then it can understand language — that experience of the world and embodied understandings of the world — aren’t required to solve its challenges. These things are far from settled. But at the moment, the price tag for AGI is $7 Trillion US dollars.
Artificial General Intelligence is also a story. It is a story told by people with power in the tech industry as a means of justifying their claim to that power. The “risk” of Artificial Intelligence is the same story, attached to a warning: that any shift in power away from the incumbent technology companies will result in chaos and destruction.
AGI risk storytelling involves speculation about when we will arrive at AGI, sidestepping conversations about whether we ever actually could... AGI risk storytelling involves speculation about when we will arrive at AGI, sidestepping conversations about whether we ever actually could... It is now a mainstream idea, and it is shifting the ground from thought experiment to urgent necessity, steering policy conversations, and shifting the frames through which we understand and define the risk of AI. Institutes focused on AGI risk, such as The Future of Life Institute, have been granted at least $660 million from crypto billionaires to worry about imaginary problems.
[OpenAI is] a company that works almost exclusively on deepfake technologies while lobbying Congress to demand access to exponential sums of human data to build a thing that they claim might kill all of us.
Kate Brown, "An Uncanny Exhibition Turns the Online World Into Artistic Material", in Artnet News, May 13, 2024
That abject irony that embodied this art scene around the 2016 Berlin Biennale, so cozied up it was with corporate slang and a flip of the hair, seems to have bled out—a feeling of real stakes has emerged.
darkness—a sense of non-permeable black zones—pervades the spaces by way of black walls and dim lights... It does make it hard to remember the sterility that can be associated with post-internet art.
The tone of that biennale on the whole (there were many compelling works), which came to be the emblem of post-internet art—largely cynical, apolitical, typified by a bit of smugness—has lost an edge. And actually, it would seem crass in the world of 2024.
Rather than driving around the dubious detritus of the web, the group show steers right into it, and some of the most interesting works looks unflinchingly at the darker corners of the internet.
Kyle Chayka, "Who Wins and Who Loses When We Share a Meme", in The New Yorker, May 15, 2024
The art work, she [Claire Bishop] writes,“is less self-important, less total; it grants us the space to be mobile and social, to react,chat, share, and archive as we watch.” These changes, in a way, represent a return to apre-modern way of consuming culture through “sociable spectatorship.” [...] Wagner decided to align the audience to face the stage directly, and,whereas, in the past, theatres had been well lit, he decided to plunge them into darkness.What was once a social experience became an individual encounter with art, in themodernist mode. Perhaps the smartphone has merely restored our ability to talk to oneanother about the aesthetic experience at hand and make it our own. We are all artcurators now, exhibiting a selection of works on our feeds.
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, "BETWEEN THE LINES. The art of Vera Molnar", in Artforum, May 2024, vol. 62, n. 9
"Molnar... recognized the futility of an objective approach to artmaking. Computers and algorithms were, she observed, ultimately human creations. “It may seem paradoxical,” she wrote in 1989, that this “so-called inhuman machine helps to realize what is most subjective, what is most profound in man.” At a moment when the computer was threatening to replace the artist, Molnar was testing its limits, investigating aspects of the artistic process that could not be automated. These questions are all the more relevant today"
"THE HISTORY OF ART tends to focus on the art object, not the process that gave rise to it. The task of uncovering the process behind Molnar’s computer graphics might therefore seem outside art history’s bounds. But it’s precisely in Molnar’s process, I argue, that she made her most significant contributions to contemporary art and aesthetics."
"Molnar’s programs were not deterministic. Rather, they were exploratory, experimental, and generative. Moreover, reenacting Molnar’s process emphasizes two key aspects: collaboration and trial and error."
"Rarely did she set out with a preconceived plan for a drawing; rather, she tinkered with the program or its parameters until she reached a desired outcome. This reassertion of her own subjective choices was a necessary part of her process; there were certain artistic decisions the computer simply could not make. My reenactment offered a deeper understanding of her interventionist approach... Then and now, the computer is a conversation partner—one that consistently offers surprising results we cannot imagine on our own."
Kyle Chayka, "The Revenge of the Home Page", in The New Yorker, May 1, 2024
"Now digital-distribution infrastructure is crumbling, having become both ineffective for publishers and alienating for users. Social networks, already lackluster sources for news, are overwhelmed by misinformation and content generated by artificial intelligence. A.I.-driven search threatens to upend how articles get traffic from Google... Surrounded by dreck, the digital citizen is discovering that the best way to find what she used to get from social platforms is to type a URL into a browser bar and visit an individual site. Many of those sites, meanwhile, have worked hard to make themselves feel a bit more like social media"
“People are interested in things that are curated by humans.”
"One welcome lesson of the post-platform Internet is that sticking to what you’re good at might be a better strategy in the long run than trying to make content that’s popular."
Reza Negarestani, "Sahej Rahal: A Life That Wanders In Time", in Miriam Kelly (ed.), Feedback Loops, exhib. cat., Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2019
"a lifeform is not a species that simply dies but a flux of life that is determined by the form of its social practices shared among its members. Its perceptual and noetic images of itself are formed by language which is through and through collectively practiced and shaped. Yet insofar as the social or cultural practices which constitute the language can evolve or can be reconfigured such that the nature of language changes in the process, a lifeform can outlive its specific and contingent historical format such as homo sapiens as a biological species." p. 22
"The self-consciousness of the fact that we have always been artifacts of our own historical concepts leads to the understanding that what comes after us and through our practices is also us but not burdened by the particularity of our wheres and whens. It is truly an outside perspective into what we are right here and now." p. 24
Günseli Yalcinkaya, "Watch an AI Julia Fox deliver a sermon about tech doomerism", in Dazed, 27 October 2023
“We wanted to present AI as this, like, twisted reflection of our present moment, in all its unhinged, horrific, and glorious wonder.”
"If we’re stuck seeing it as either the saviour or the destroyer of worlds then we’re screwed. It’s just something that happens to us, and we’re at its mercy. But, if we view it as a mirror reflecting our current state of affairs, we can, at least, claim some say in what it reflects, how we look at it, and what we do with its reflection, even if what it presents to us might be janky, distorted and not as hot as we would like to believe."
"The more people freak out about AI, the more they start throwing around religious talk and imagery. Again, this tracks with the myth of AI as this god-like demon separate from the material world. It’s clearly giving displacement vibes for our collective end-time fears... But let’s keep it real. This whole ‘AI as a vengeful god’ shit is just a childish way to avoid dealing with the actual issues at hand"
"This whole techno-gnostic vibe promotes this lame idea that our bodies are basically like computers, you know? They want us to believe we can break ourselves down into lines of code and understand it all, totally computationally. The real problem here is that this mindset is a total buzzkill, blunting the richness of our real, physical existence. It tries to scrub away the mysterious, the enigmatic, the bizarre aspects of life and blames it all on a lack of data, rather than a fundamental quality of reality. It’s straight-up disrespecting matter, our bodies, life."
Anna Wiener, "How Perfectly Can Reality Be Simulated?", in The New Yorker, April 15, 2024
"When you spend hours thinking about computer graphics, he told me, the subject “tends to be unavoidable in your life. You’re walking through a dark scene outdoors at night, and it’s rainy, and you’re seeing the street light bounce off of the road, and you’re seeing all these beautiful fringes of color, and you realize, Oh, I should be able to render this.” Tim Sweeney
“The solution to fluid dynamics and to fire and to all these other phenomena we see in the real world is just brute-force math,” Sweeney said. “If we have enough computing power to throw at the equations, we can solve them.” But humans have an intuitive sense of how others should look, sound, and move, which is based on our evolution and cognition. “We don’t even know the equations we need to solve in order to simulate humans,” Sweeney said. “Nobody’s invented them yet.”
"Some attempts at realism, it struck me, were so realistic that they could only be fake."
Kyle Chayka, "The Internet’s New Favorite Philosopher", in The New Yorker, April 17, 2024
"“It’s a meme but not in the funny way—in the way that it’s sort of concise and easily disseminated. I can send this to my friends who aren’t as into reading to help them think about something,” she said. Like a Sartre for the age of screens, Han puts words to our prevailing condition of not-quite-hopeless digital despair."
"One of the ironies of Han’s writing is that it travels easily through the very channels that he despairs of. By condensing his ideas into brief, unadorned sentences, Han flatters the reader into almost feeling as though she has thought the thoughts herself. “The Burnout Society” and Han’s other books now star in countless YouTube explainer videos and TikTok summaries."
“The kind of reductive clarity which is so important to how his writing functions is also part of the risk of it going very wrong” Charles Pidgeon
"One has to wonder what Han makes of the way that his own ideas have flourished in theInternet information economy, within the avalanche of non-things."
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, "Theorems of Life (As an Addendum and Clarification on Monism)", in e-flux Journal, Issue #65, May 2015
"no single particle of matter can avoid having already been part of something living and having already participated in life."
"An animal is a combination of a mechanism and chemical actions. In the simplest of creatures the chemical life is complex, but the mechanism is simple. The higher the animal on the biological ladder, the greater its chemical quality, and the more intricate its mechanism."
"The spirit of childhood will not experience the feelings of adolescence. We needlessly fear the agony of death for a reason: it will be experienced by other spirits, and not the atoms of the current body."
Yuval Abraham, "‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza", in +972 Magazine, April 3, 2024
"the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets... during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants — and their homes — for possible air strikes."
"human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions... This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all."
"A fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list."
Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, Margaret Mitchell, "Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter", in DAIR, March 31, 2023
"It is dangerous to distract ourselves with a fantasized AI-enabled utopia or apocalypse which promises either a "flourishing" or "potentially catastrophic" future. Such language that inflates the capabilities of automated systems and anthropomorphizes them... deceives people into thinking that there is a sentient being behind the synthetic media. This not only lures people into uncritically trusting the outputs of systems like ChatGPT, but also misattributes agency. Accountability properly lies not with the artifacts but with their builders."
"Those most impacted by AI systems, the immigrants subjected to "digital border walls," the women being forced to wear specific clothing, the workers experiencing PTSD while filtering outputs of generative systems, the artists seeing their work stolen for corporate profit, and the gig workers struggling to pay their bills should have a say in this conversation."
"We should be building machines that work for us, instead of "adapting" society to be machine readable and writable."
Philip Di Salvo, "GLI ALGORITMI NON SOGNANO", in Notzine 1, 2024
"Nell’ottica di Frankfurt, la bullshit è più di una bugia: è qualcosa che viene espresso senza alcun riguardo nei confronti della realtà fattuale, senza alcuna preoccupazione in riferimento al vero o al suo contrario. Il bullshitter, in questo senso, non ha alcun interesse a mentire, perché per farlo dovrebbe accettare l’esistenza di una verità da contraddire."
"Nessuno di questi strumenti esiste per creare alcunché di vagamente vero o rispettoso delle volontà degli esseri umani che formulano le richieste alla macchina. Nel loro fornire un output sulla base di un input, queste forme algoritmiche rispondono a un criterio puramente statistico e quantitativo... Creare qualcosa di verosimile senza avere alcuna percezione del vero, come abbiamo visto, è la definizione quintessenziale di bullshit."
"Parlare di dominio delle macchine, di sterminio, di guerre lanciate da intelligenze artificiali bellicose e vendicative è un ottimo modo per sommergere di bullshit problemi e rischi assolutamente non-bullshit, che stanno già ora rendendo la vita di molte persone ancora più difficile."
"È più che prevedibile anche che vi sarà un’adozione massiva di questi strumenti nel settore della pubblicità online, specialmente in quella che infesta le pagine web già ora con contenuti bullshit per lo più già piazzati in automatico. Questo mondo di clickbait, spam, pseudo-contenuti, quasi-truffe e monetizzazione degli spiccioli prodotti dalla nostra scarsa attenzione non aspettava altro che la possibilità di generare ulteriori bullshit nel modo più economico e scalabile possibile."
Edoardo Camurri, Erik Davis, "DENTRO L’INCONSCIO DELLA TECNOLOGIA", in Notzine 1, 2024
"Parte dell’inquietudine di Midjourney e simili è che percepiamo che gli algoritmi e gli insiemi di dati stanno colonizzando non solo il nostro inconscio, ma la stessa facoltà di immaginazione. Ma quando gli artisti usano i nuovi strumenti per plasmare e sfrondare in modi ingegnosi, non sta forse accadendo qualcosa di diverso, qualcosa di più “cyborg” che parassitario?"
Lauren Lee McCarthy, "Spilling out of the screen", in Outland, March 19, 2024
"We seem to expect a sterile cleanliness from technology. As digital art is neatly organized into boxes within boxes, performance offers a way to escape the frame."
Emily Steer, ‘Ceramics Are as Contemporary as a Smartphone:’ Chiara Camoni on Her Tactile Sculptures, in Artnet News, March 20, 2024
"there are two kinds of artists... those who do not touch matter, and those who cannot do without it.” (Chiara Camoni)
“Ceramics, stone, or wood are as contemporary to us as a smartphone”
Oskar Oprey, "RACHEL MACLEAN On the redemption and reconfiguration of deepfake", in Artforum, March 4, 2024
"the fear for me is less that deepfakes can be untruthful and more how that is exploited. The right has been successful in recent years in creating the impression that nothing is true and therefore anything can be true. It’s a clever way to manipulate reality to suit you."
"everything it puts out is really unsettling. Categories and boundaries in the physical world are often confused or overlooked, so you get visions of bodies melding into one another and fusing with the background. It is like AI can see the truth of our fucked-up interconnected world in a way we can’t. I’m pretty sure that in a year or so they’ll fix this and it will all look seamless, which will be disappointing."
Taylor Dafoe, "Artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst Send A.I. Mutants to the Whitney Biennial", in Artnet News, March 27, 2024
“models are supposed to be objective, but there’s no such thing... Your idea of a cup is different from my idea of a cup. And when it comes to individuals, and the way that you want to present yourself online, how much agency do we have in that?” (Holly Herndon)
“You could sell an emancipatory vision of having agency over how you appear in models, and I do hope that we will get there, but currently you do not have agency.” (Mat Dryhurst)
"Among those advocating for change, there are two camps: those who want to alter it within, and those who want to blow it up and create something new. Herndon and Dryhurst unequivocally belong to the former. They have come to the conclusion that, in Dryhurst’s words, we are “far better off trying to make interventions inside the tent.”"
Andrew Marantz, "Among the A.I. Doomsayers", in The New Yorker, March 11, 2024
"Pessimists are called A.I. safetyists, or decelerationists—or, whenthey’re feeling especially panicky, A.I. doomers... techno-optimists... call themselves “effective accelerationists,” or e/accs (pronounced “e-acks”), and they believe A.I. will usher in a utopian future—interstellar travel, the end ofdisease—as long as the worriers get out of the way. On social media, they trolldoomsayers as “decels,” “psyops,” “basically terrorists,” or, worst of all, “regulation-lovingbureaucrats.”"
"P(doom) is theprobability that, if A.I. does become smarter than people, it will, either on purpose or byaccident, annihilate everyone on the planet."
"This is not safe, ’cause the A.I.s gottheir own minds, and these motherfuckers are gonna start doing their own shit" (Snoop Dogg)
"Even assuming that superintelligent A.I. is years away, there is still plenty that can gowrong in the meantime."
"The doomers and the boomers are consumed by intramural fights, but from a distancethey can look like two offshoots of the same tribe: people who are convinced that A.I. isthe only thing worth paying attention to... “The same people cycle between selling AGI utopia and doom,” Timnit Gebru, a former Google computer scientist and now a critic of the industry, told me. “Theyare all endowed and funded by the tech billionaires who build all the systems we’resupposed to be worried about making us extinct.”"
Ingrid Luquet-Gad, "Hardcore Décor: the Comeback of Craft as an Antidote to Cyberfatigue", in Zerodeux, issue: 86, 2018
" In the present-day art world, the great comeback of the politics of identity and engaged art, focusing on “subverting” and “questioning” the hegemonies of race, gender (above all) and class (at times) is being more clearly identified. But craftsmanship, understood in the broad sense as a framework of thought, not to say as a practice of resistance, is also part and parcel of this, as is illustrated by the first portents which are seeing young artists putting traditional and even marginal techniques back at the centre of the artistic ecosystem."
"Skill is a trained practice; modern technology is abused when it deprives its users precisely of that repetitive, concrete, hands-on training." (Richard Sennett, p. 51)
“The smart machine can separate human mental understanding from repetitive, instructive, hands-on learning. When this occurs, conceptual human powers suffer”.(Richard Sennett, p. 52)
Sarah Hromack, "Half a Century Before Midjourney, There Was AARON", in Hyperallergic, March 10, 2024
"This early version of artificial intelligence is based on individual knowledge — not the massive mashups of data, or Large Language Models (LLMs) that current versions of artificial intelligence software train on. The resulting drawings and paintings, with their Fauvist palette and wide-ranging level of abstraction, demonstrate the software’s evolution: Cohen wrote around 60 versions of AARON in his lifetime. His prescience as a programmer and an inventor is, in my estimation, as relevant as — and perhaps even more exciting than — the artworks produced by AARON, as joyous as they are."
" As an exhibition that effectively demystifies technology, Harold Cohen: AARON offers us the space to contemplate the still-symbiotic relationship between the human mind and the machine. It says, “We could be fine, after all.”"
Jiayin Chen, "Artist Quayola On Why Algorithmic Art Is Like Impressionism", in Artnet News, March 8, 2024
"Various computer-vision and machine-learning strategies have been used to extract data from the original videos, from describing the movement of the waves to extrapolating color palettes and features from the landscapes. Subsequently the data served as guidance for my pictorial simulations, or as I call them, computational paintings. Ultimately, I am interested in creating computational systems to translate specific natural behaviors and phenomena into new forms of pictorial representation."
"in my work, the focus on nature is always linked to the historical tradition of landscape representation; particularly, a modernist tradition where nature becomes a vehicle for discovering new aesthetics and gradually moving towards total abstraction. I speculate on new forms of landscape painting, reflecting on how technology is rapidly changing the way we observe and perceive the world around us, and ultimately, reality itself."
"The marriage of artistic sensibility and irreducible computational potential generates a renewed wonder, or rather a new form of the sublime: the technological sublime. The new sublime is no longer an experience relative to the power of nature, but rather a disturbance and fascination for the new technological languages."
Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I.", in The New Yorker, March 9, 2024
“There’s a fundamental mismatch between this technology and environmental sustainability” Alex de Vries
“I think we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology,” Altman said at a public appearance in Davos. He didn’t see how these needs could be met, he went on, “without a breakthrough.” He added, “We need fusion or we need, like, radically cheaper solar plus storage, or something, at massive scale—like, a scale that no one is really planning for.”
"data centers are, for now at least, a small part of the problem. Still, as the use of A.I. ramps up and bitcoin prices reach new heights, the question is: How can the world reach net zero if it keeps inventing new ways to consume energy?"
Will Douglas Heaven, "Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why", in MIT Technology Review, March 4, 2024
"They found that in certain cases, models could seemingly fail to learn a task and then all of a sudden just get it, as if a lightbulb had switched on. This wasn’t how deep learning was supposed to work. They called the behavior grokking."
"The largest models, and large language models in particular, seem to behave in ways textbook math says they shouldn’t... The biggest models are now so complex that researchers are studying them as if they were strange natural phenomena, carrying out experiments and trying to explain the results."
“Many people in the field often compare it to physics at the beginning of the 20th century. We have a lot of experimental results that we don’t completely understand, and often when you do an experiment it surprises you.” Boaz Barak
"The rapid advances in deep learning over the last 10-plus years came more from trial and error than from understanding... the recipes are more alchemy than chemistry"
“Without some sort of fundamental theory, it’s very hard to have any idea what we can expect from these things” Mikhail Belkin
Charles Tonderai Mudede, "Will AI Remember the Days of Slavery?", in e-flux Journal, Issue #143, March 2024
"AI will not solve poverty, because the conditions that lead to societies that pursue profit over people are not technical. AI will not solve discrimination, because the cultural patterns that say one group of people is better than another because of their gender, their skin color, the way they speak, their height, or their wealth are not technical. AI will not solve climate change, because the political and economic choices that exploit the earth’s resources are not technical matters." (Joy Buolamwini)
Jaron Lanier, "How to Picture A.I.", in The New Yorker, March 1, 2024
"if we can’t understand how a technology works, we risk succumbing to magical thinking."
"to some degree,there’s a resistance to demystifying what we do because we want to approach it mystically. The usual terminology, starting with the phrase “artificial intelligence” itself, is all about the idea that we are making new creatures instead of new tools."
"One of thedangers of A.I. is that we might start to act as if everything that can be done in the future is similar enough to what’s been done in the past that A.I. can do it all. I believe that we should resist this assumption."
Laura Tripaldi, "2.2 Million New Materials Discovered with AI", in Soft Futures, January 25, 2024
"What happens if, instead of separating geology, biology, and language into discrete spheres, we begin to understand our planet as one integrated, always already artificial layer — the technosphere?"
"Clearly, the notion of technology as a cultural tool that serves human agency has already reached its expiration date. The growing entanglements of computational processes and material bodies are making it increasingly obvious that — to quote a recurring phrase in Frank Herbert’s Dune — all technologies are animated by their own “terrible purpose”. We, however, should remain careful not to mistake this purpose for a universal master plan."
Alexandra Gilliams, “Dismantling The House Tech Built: Mimi Ọnụọha”, in Spike, 6 February 2024
“our lives are being pushed into a house that technology has built. We don’t always get a say over that process. That house is still being constructed and deconstructed, though, and these works suggest how we can contest certain visions of the data, information, and knowledge flowing through these channels. There are many ways of knowing the world.”
“A strange phenomenon with digital systems is getting classified and not knowing what group you’re classified into. You don’t have agency or the ability to organize with people – to commiserate and say we’ve all been affected in the same way... It can be empowering to be classified, but that relies on knowing and being able to come together with those you’ve been classified with.”
“There are always patterns. Violence happens in patterns.”
“My fear is that we will gravitate towards what is easy to receive – more data collection, models, AI applications – rather than what is needed: a way of making sense of the questions that lie beyond what data can tell us. We need to understand that the way a computer or model sees the world is one way of seeing, and though that vision aids with certain issues, it cannot save us from them all.”
Kat Kitay, “What’s after Post-Internet Art?”, in Spike, 28 February 2024
“Against the machines of the first Industrial Revolution, the Romantics abandoned reason to pursue the eternal and inalienable features of the human spirit: beauty, love, melancholy, and wonder. “All that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime,” said Edmund Burke in 1757. Today, we exist in a sea of technological complexity in which Romanticism is reborn: individualism in influencers, melancholy in doomscrolling, love in devices, fear in AI. Vast, subterranean networks of fiber-optic cables crisscross the planet, offering an ersatz sublime at our fingertips. This is technoromanticism.”
“The technoromantic reimagines posting as liturgy, algorithms as messengers, and artists as saints. They reach into a glorified past for motifs and meaning that invoke the aura of life before memes.Their aesthetic flirtation with the materiality of technology is a double-edged sword, however, that blurs the lines between critique and commodity fetishization. The stakes for this ambivalence are high at a time when capitalist technology is threatening human dignity and agency. Do we really want to engender an emotional attachment to the internet?”
“Technoromanticism allegorizes the beauty and horror of postmodern life, entwined as it is with the fate of the internet. At its best, it makes a record of our endangered material reality and elevates our struggles above the infernal noise of digital mass media.”
“technoromantic artists can reimagine human life in hyperreality as one where the surreal and sublime rise above networked society, rather than fall prey to it.”
Tina Rivers Ryan, “The Story of NFTs”, in Burlington, February 15, 2024
“Do DAOs perpetuate a money story that is opaque and exclusive, much like the traditional commercial art market, or do they enable more people to participate in a system and provide equal access to ownership of an asset? The answer, of course, is that they do both. The capitalist pressure to sell a digital asset with the greatest possible value once again bears down on a more democratic ideal of shared ownership.” Amy Whitaker and Nora Burnett Abrams
Jordan Wolfson, “Jordan Wolfson in conversation with Caroline Busta and Lil Internet”, in CURA. 41, New World Agency™, FW 23-24
“My most important job is to make art and tell the truth.”
“I think the human condition is one looping self involved acid trip.”
Martin Zeilinger, “FINANCIALIZED PLAY ON THE BLOCKCHAIN”, in Outland, January 30, 2024
“more and more video games are designed to take the form of complex capitalism simulators, whereas more and more digital finance products are designed to be experienced as if they were games... The lines between play and financial activities have become exceedingly blurry.”
“In a generous reading, blockchain-enabled, transactional digital art can be described as providing commentary on the intersections between creative practice, play, and capital... But much of this art could just as easily be accused of complicity in the financialization and gamification efforts of informational, platformized capitalism.”
“As the lines between play and financial activities are becoming more and more blurred, we have to think harder about how the effects of platform-based gamification change the social, cultural, and psychological meanings of play, how our definitions of games change when they are being financialized, and how gamification impacts our attitudes to money. In this emergent scenario, digital artists should recognize a responsibility to reveal and critique the insidious convergences at play here, rather than finding ways to blend in.”
Jaron Lanier, “Where Will Virtual Reality Take Us?”, in The New Yorker, February 2, 2024
“In V.R., you can change the rules of the world. You can exist in strange geometries that are too hard to describe in words. You can become an archipelago of parts instead of a continuous animal. You can blend and share bodies with others, to a surprising degree.”
“There’s still a you floating in the middle of it all. This makes virtual reality a consciousness-noticing machine... V.R. reminds us that experience really exists. It’s at the core of V.R. It exists even when the world around it is an illusion.
“The central question of the technological future is how to identify the people who are supposed to benefit from technology, especially if they seem to have melted into it.”
“living in V.R. makes no sense. Life within a construction is life without a frontier. It is closed, calculated, and pointless. Reality, real reality, the mysterious physical stuff, is open, unknown, and beyond us; we must not lose it.”
“... the religion of infinity in tech culture. Infinity is a fake drug, but a powerful one. No one wants to die; everyone wants to fly everywhere in the universe. Young men, especially, get high on infinity; their version of tech culture is the most influential culture of our time. It is the only remaining cultural force that can defy market forces, technological limitations, and the law—at least for a while.”
“A.I. is often portrayed as a godlike, transcendent project that will take over the fabric of our physical reality, leading to a singularity, meaning nothing that matters now is likely to matter after. But singularities, like the ones we hypothesize in black holes, are the very definition of ignorance. There is no learning that bridges the before and after of a singularity. It is the absolute rejection of intelligence.”
“Technical culture often longs for freedom from finitude. A profound truth, however, is that the greatest mysteries are found in conserved systems, which can become rich and complex, not in infinite ones, which stretch out like blank white sheets to the edge of the cosmos.”
Joshua Citarella, “A Letter to Young Creatives”, February 7, 2024
“we often don't know what the important work is while we’re making it. Sometimes, it’s a more significant contribution to respond to the conditions that you are in, instead of what you may have imagined as the proper context.”
“don’t think about the situation you’re in as an interruption. It might just be the work.”
“Many of us envision the white cube gallery or museum as the final context for our work. But this idea presupposes a certain type of society and political economy that no longer exists.”
“the infrastructure to produce and cultivate young artists has proportionately declined. The context in which we presuppose to show our work is becoming much more scarce.”
“Today, we can’t assume that our work will be entered into a certain canon. Or even that the institutions in which we show and discuss art will exist forever... If the very existence of the state (the meta-institution which upholds all others) cannot be guaranteed, then there is little reason to think our magazines or museums are any more durable.”
Annie Armstrong, “Artist Ryan Trecartin Built His Career on the Internet. Now, He’s Decided It’s Pretty Boring”, in Artnet News, January 22, 2024
“The way everything is so algorithmic is no longer funny; it’s just depressing—these little trappings and prisons that are being generated that we reinforce just because they work. It’s just boring! It’s not interesting.”
“Everyone thinks that my first movies were about the internet, but they weren’t. I think because of the times I was living in, the internet made people understand what I was trying to say. The thing is we always invent things inside the limits of our imagination.”
“the internet already is us and was always us.”
Adam Schrader, “Demand for a New Tool That Poisons Generative A.I. Models Has Been ‘Off the Charts’”, in Artnet News, February 1, 2024
“Nightshade functions by “shading” images at the pixel level to make them appear entirely different, causing any images generated by an A.I. model to be flawed and affecting how a machine learning algorithm views them. It is a sister product of Glaze, which seeks to cause A.I. models to misidentify an art style and replicate it incorrectly. The team is currently working on combining the tools.”
Brian Droitcour, “The Shape of the Market”, in Outland, January 3, 2024
“NFTs and blockchains aren’t solutions in themselves; things like automated royalties, touted as a technological advantage of the market, were implemented and have been maintained through social consensus... The rapid formation and collapse of the NFT market exposed the truth behind all markets for art and other intangible values: that worth is determined through collective consensus. And perhaps the path forward might be found in artworks that thematize innovative ways of building consensus, including play with rarity, interactivity, and collaboration.”
Ben Davis, “10 Predictions About Unexpected Ways A.I. Will Reshape Art (Part 2 of 2)”, in Artnet News, December 27, 2023
“What is left when an A.I. can quickly abstract your characteristic mode of expression and spit out something that looks exactly like you made it? The answer is just you, the person, and your actual lived connection to your own image as a maker. The logical corollary of ubiquitous creative A.I. is the ubiquity of the artist themself, as a character.”
“as digital space becomes more dominated by inhuman actors, people might want to reestablish some kind of “performative digital dualism,” to create spaces where images aren’t experienced as training assets immediately sucked up into the A.I. stream.”
Ben Davis, “10 Predictions About Unexpected Ways A.I. Will Reshape Art (Part 1 of 2)”, in Artnet News, December 26, 2023
“Trained on the vast sea of images on the internet, A.I. art generators spit out things that have a lot of the formal qualities of things we like to look at, and that are called art. But whatever can be done easily with the technology is not what is going to be recognized as “art,” because art is by definition the exceptional case of something, not the default.”
Erik Salvaggio, “What I Learned About AI in 2023”, in Cybernetic Forests, December 17, 2023
“In technology, failure doesn’t exist: it just gets replaced by whatever will fail next.”
“The technologies that came to define AI this year seem, in fact, hopelessly disconnected from problem solving.”
“you need money to run these models — positioned as the future of our entire economy even as they lose about $700,000 per day.”
Walter Robinson, “Laurie Simmons and Walter Robinson Enter the Big-Breasted World of A.I. Art”, in Interview Magazine, December 11, 2023
“When I picked up a camera in the mid-seventies, the history of photography was about 135 years old, so it was easy for me to learn the history at the same time that I was learning to use a camera. I feel a responsibility to understand the information around A.I,, but that information is coming at us so fast and so furiously.”
“Since my first photographs, I’ve been interested in interstitial spaces between reality and fantasy, or humans and surrogates. It’s always the in-between spots. That’s another reason that A.I. appeals to me.”
“Since my first photographs, I’ve been interested in interstitial spaces between reality and fantasy, or humans and surrogates. It’s always the in-between spots. That’s another reason that A.I. appeals to me.”
Min Chen, “‘A Collaborator Who Understood My Vision’: Laurie Simmons, Casey Reas, and Mario Klingemann on How A.I. Is Fueling Creativity”, in Artnet News, December 20, 2023
“Working with A.I. imagery is much like your dog dragging you down the street and a friendly stranger asking you: “Who’s walking who?”” Laurie Simmons
“our relationship with A.I. will be one of collaboration rather than competition. A.I.’s strength lies in its ability to analyze patterns and produce volume, but it lacks the nuances of human perception, emotion, and intuition. Once we understand these limitations, we can channel A.I.’s capabilities to our advantage, making it an extended tool of our creative exploration rather than a threat to human artistry.” Mario Klingemann
“I always train my own datasets rather than working with the larger models that are pre-trained. I think training datasets is where a lot of the agency comes in.” **Casey Reas **
Laura Tripaldi, “Ecology of Snowflakes”, in Soft Futures, December 21, 2023
“we should be careful not to project our too-human paradigms of beauty and order onto nonhuman matter, or to use matter as a passive canvas for our own moral and philosophical meanings.”
Matteo Pasquinelli, “The Automation of General Intelligence”, in e-flux Journal, Issue #141, December 2023
“We live in the age of digital data, and in that age mathematics has become the parliament of politics... With digital data, mathematics has become the dominant means in which human beings coordinate with technology.” Politically Mathematics manifesto, 2019
“the project of AI has actually emerged from the automation of the psychometrics of labor and social behaviors rather than from the quest to solve the “enigma” of intelligence... the current form of AI, machine learning, is the automation of the statistical metrics that were originally introduced to quantify cognitive, social, and work-related abilities.”
“Ultimately, AI is not only a tool for automating labor but also for imposing standards of mechanical intelligence that propagate, more or less invisibly, social hierarchies of knowledge and skill. As with any previous form of automation, AI does not simply replace workers but displaces and restructures them into a new social order.”
“machine learning can be seen as the project to automate the very process of machine design and model making—which is to say, the automation of the labor theory of automation itself. In this sense, machine learning and, specifically, large foundation models represent a new definition of the Universal Machine, for their capacity is not just to perform computational tasks but to imitate labor and collective behaviors at large.”
“The debate on the fear that AI will fully replace jobs is misguided: in the so-called platform economy, algorithms replace management and multiply precarious jobs... by using the same infrastructure worldwide these platforms have established monopoly positions. The power of the new “master” is not about the automation of individual tasks but the management of the social division of labor. Against Alan Turing’s prediction, it is the master, not the worker, whom the robot has come to replace first.”
“What is needed is neither techno-solutionism nor techno-pauperism, but instead a culture of invention, design, and planning that cares for communities and the collective, and never entirely relinquishes agency and intelligence to automation. The first step of techno-politics is not technological but political.”
Silvia Dal Dosso, “Here are the 10 unmissable digital achievements of 2023”, in Domusweb, 18 December 2023
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology” Edward O. Wilson
“Some find solace in viewing GenAIs as mere tools... but in the midst of this reassurance, we are witnessing a relentless sprint toward increasingly complex management of politics and society, with outcomes that remain both unknown and beyond our control.”
Shumon Basar, “The Dawn of Endcore”, in Flash Art, Issue 341, 14 December 2022
“DALL-E and other prompt-generated text-to-image software remind us how we are now just machines that spew up absurd search terms for AI’s amusement.”
“Endcore is an endgame, an aporia. If optimism is impossible in our storyline, the one we seem to be living in, then why can’t we travel to a multiverse where there’s no Endcore? Where climate grief never happened? Where there’s no microplastics in the Antarctic snow? Multiverses have invaded popular culture today because they offer an escape from Endcore.”
“The allure of scrolling for something better, swiping for someone hotter, has destroyed my attention. Yours too, if you’re honest.”
Franco Berardi, “Un teatro di provincia”, in Iconografie, Novembre 2023
“La democrazia si è rivelata da tempo come una difesa assai fragile, quando la mente collettiva (la cosiddetta volontà generale) è invasa da flussi di paura, di depressione o di odio.”
“il nazismo hitleriano non ha nulla di eccezionale rispetto alla storia del colonialismo spagnolo inglese, francese, russo, italiano, giapponese, americano. Il nazismo hitleriano è solo la punta di un iceberg di violenza razzista che intesse tutta la storia moderna.”
“l’Occidente non ha più futuro e lo sa, lo percepisce. Non è più possibile nessuna espansione, sia questa territoriale, demografica oppure economica... Il declino dell’Occidente è irrimediabile, e il pericolo risiede proprio in questo: in preda al marasma senile, la cultura dominante predatrice può scegliere il suicidio.”
“La nuova divisione del mondo che si va delineando, e che oppone sul piano economico e geopolitico il Sud colonizzato e l’Occidente colonizzatore, non contrappone affatto un fronte politico omogeneo ad un altro. Per questo non andiamo verso una guerra mondiale ma verso un proliferare di conflitti locali che progressivamente si saldano in un’unica e caotica guerra globale.”
“Il solo “noi” in cui posso identificarmi è quello dell’estinzione, del divenire nulla. Non credo che l’umanità abbia alcun futuro, perché non ha più un presente, e il passato umano è cancellato dal cinismo.”
Callum Bains, “Digital curator Giulia Carla Rossi: ‘There is a misconception that if something is on the internet it will last for ever’”, in The Guardian, November 18, 2023
“It’s easy to take for granted the technology we have access to right now. Apps and tablets are still very much alive and happening, and people might not realise how fragile some of these formats are, because they are reliant on bespoke software. It’s hard to think far in the future and realise that the kind of technology, and even the way we read, might be very different in a few years’ time.”
Dasha Nekrasova, “Jon Rafman and Dasha Nekrasova on the Horror We Call Life”, in Interview Magazine, December 15, 2023
“To come up with new ideas, you have to have space to be messy, to procrastinate, and to let your mind wander and free-associate. But there needs to be a balance. You eventually need to channel it into something concrete, or you won’t produce anything.”
“It’s important to acknowledge the realities of the horror show we call life, but also strive to move beyond that and not let the world beat you down or force you into submission.”
“Apparently, not getting exposed to different views is worse for people because you avoid developing critical thinking skills or even empathy. They give you a false sense of security, so you’re not really dealing with your fears head-on.”
“How we experience time and memory has been altered completely. It’s like we’re stuck in a perpetual now. When the apocalypse arrives, it’s going to be reduced to just another clickbait headline.”
“In the ’90s a universal discourse existed; we all consumed the same pop culture to a degree. We’ve lost that shared language and people increasingly live in their own bubbles and niche communities. Everyone’s undergoing an entirely different algorithmically tailored simulation of reality. It’s difficult to make generalizations, especially regarding youth culture. The consensus on what constitutes reality has collapsed, and A.I. accelerated the process.”
“Ninety-nine point nine percent of A.I. art is shit, but that’s probably true for all art produced.”
“I see A.I. as an artistic tool like the camera or whatever. It has completely changed the way I make art on so many levels, and eliminated so many time-consuming menial tasks, giving me more time to focus on the things that matter”
“A.I. is terrifying. Algorithms can profoundly manipulate our behaviors, often understanding our patterns better than we do.”
“For better or worse, technological progress is inevitable. I don’t think you can stop the A.I. revolution, you can only adapt to it.”
Adina Glickstein, “Exit the Matrix”, in Spike, 13 December 2023
“I would wager that most dystopian writers don’t really think utopia is for suckers – it’s more that pinning one’s politics entirely on hope while facing extinction feels somewhat delusional.” Elvia Wilk
“accepting the horizon of extinction, and avoiding panic, will probably be the only way to escape extinction itself, the only way to find a different horizon, a different future.” Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Vitalik Buterin, “My Techno Optimism”, November 27, 2023
“I believe in a future that is vastly brighter than the present thanks to radically transformative technology, and I believe in humans and humanity. I reject the mentality that the best we should try to do is to keep the world roughly the same as today but with less greed and more public healthcare. However, I think that not just magnitude but also direction matters. There are certain types of technology that much more reliably make the world better than other types of technology. There are certain types of technlogy that could, if developed, mitigate the negative impacts of other types of technology. The world over-indexes on some directions of tech development, and under-indexes on others. We need active human intention to choose the directions that we want, as the formula of "maximize profit" will not arrive at them automatically.”
“It seems very hard to have a "friendly" superintelligent-AI-dominated world where humans are anything other than pets.”
“Digital authoritarianism has been on the rise for a decade, and surveillance technology has already given authoritarian governments powerful new strategies to crack down on opposition: let the protests happen, but then detect and quietly go after the participants after the fact. More generally, my basic fear is that the same kinds of managerial technologies that allow OpenAI to serve over a hundred million customers with 500 employees will also allow a 500-person political elite, or even a 5-person board, to maintain an iron fist over an entire country. With modern surveillance to collect information, and modern AI to interpret it, there may be no place to hide.”
"with 21st century AI a totalitarian regime may well maintain enough surveillance and control over the world to remain "locked in" forever.”
“There is no situation where a cat will adopt an entire lifestyle of refusing to eat mice as a matter of ethical principle.”
Orit Gat, “The Digital Culture Odyssey of Post-Internet Art”, in Frieze, Issue 239, November 07, 2023
“How to describe something that happened quite recently but feels old?”
“The only thing I can definitely say now is that post-internet is over. It’s over not only because the artists associated with post-internet art... are doing something else, but also because of a cultural change in the way we think about the internet.”
“even if it resembled a meme, it was commentary.”
“when we discuss digital culture, our job is to take things seriously: cat photos, government regulation, money, labour and exploitation all exist in the same sphere, and that sphere now defines our lives. Recognizing the weirdness, the highly specific aesthetics and the ways social scenes gather around digital platforms is part of writing the history of digital culture. That’s where post-internet art fits in the history of art. It’s slippery and highly specific and was very social. It was a moment online, and artists were making work (and memes and jokes) that reflected it. They were making history.”
Evan Moffitt, Daniel Terna, “What Happens When an Artist’s Technology Becomes Obsolete?”, in The New York Times, Oct. 17, 2023
“Digital files of all stripes are made up of data — zeros and ones — and, every so often, a zero can turn into a one through electrostatic discharge in your hard drive or in a big server farm. That corrupts the file.” There are methods for fixing this, she said, “but that’s a very niche level of understanding, and I don’t think a lot of archives or collecting institutions do that, really.” Caroline Gil
Jo Lawson-Tancred, “Art Critic Jerry Saltz Gets Into an Online Skirmish With A.I. Superstar Refik Anadol”, in Artnet News, November 28, 2023
“The world you coming from is changed! New world is bright, new world is inclusive, new world has no gates! I’m everyone! You are no one!” Refik Anadol (!)
ALEX QUICHO, “Everyone Is a Girl Online”, in Wired, September 11, 2023
“platform-determined behavioral design, with its vectors of attentional capture leading to the illusion of monetary reward, is simply forced feminization. To wish to be perceived, desired, and rewarded for cultivating that desire is the default setting for participating in digital culture, making all of us “girls online” regardless of gender.”
“advanced technology doesn’t necessarily embody the all too familiar tropes of servitude or existential threat, but rather, presents a viable, aspirational model of how to be. Artificiality not only feels more desirable but also more tangible than the real.” Xin Wang
Drew Zeiba, “ABSENCE OF MIND: THE NATURE DOCUMENTARY IN THE AGE OF AI”, in Spike, 9.11.2023
“As a form, the nature documentary argues that the truth of our world can only be accessed with better and better imaging technology.”
“Our dominant concept of nature couldn’t be more artificial, nor any more a product of domination. Even the best-intended missions to return to or protect an unadulterated wilderness fail to recognize that such a wilderness was never there.”
“A new technology isn’t another world... But it lets another world come into being. It’s like a viewfinder that reveals a potential reality. It depends where we point it, what we point it at. Like a lens. What we put in front of it matters, because images matter. They shape our subconscious and imagination, and those determine our reality.” Allado-McDowell
“In a Cybernetic Animism or interdisciplinary botanopsychopharmacocosmognostic techné, AI becomes one shamanic force among many enabling not only communication with non-humans, but also subjective identification with interspecies non-humans through ritualized research and art.” Allado-McDowell
“Without doing the work to resolve, challenge, or, at the least, make interesting the connections between cognition, measurement, and generative art, these projects’ technological engagement feels like advertising for the AI industry rather than art. Statistics masquerade as reality, no less so when that reality’s fucked up by chemical entheogens or “machine hallucinations.””
Allucquère Rosanne “Sandy” Stone, “The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age”, 1995. In Mousse, 05.10.2023
“One way to read the history of technology is as a series of complexifications, knots and loosenings of the bonds and tensions between bodies and selves, mediated by technologies of communication, within a force field of power relationships—and I intend as a purposive inflection the science fiction flavor of “force fields.””
“Let’s consider bodies and selves in relation to communications technology in three ways: Selves and relationships between selves constituted and mediated by technologies of communication; i.e., an apparatus for the production of community.
Technologies that mediate cultural legibility for the biological substrates to selves, substrates that legally authenticate political action; i.e., an apparatus for the production of body.
Technologies mediating between bodies and selves that may or may not be within physical proximity; i.e., interfaces.”
“a self which moves in a spatiality from which the body is excluded.”
McKenzie Wark, “Critical (Auto) Theory”, in e-flux Journal, Issue #140, November 2023
“Selfhood itself is a fiction, and the writing is an account of how the fiction of a self is produced.”
"I think of autotheory as not too different from autofiction. Both are interested in the perceptual. Autofiction is more interested in the affective dimensions of what’s perceived; autotheory more the conceptual. It’s more interesting to think of autofiction/autotheory as tactics rather than genres, and as a continuity of tactics. I’ll call it the “autotextual”: These practices made this self. These institutions, these historical circumstances. It chanced these slings and arrows.”
“I’m just a made thing, like any other made thing—just one that is curious about its making.”
“There are two kinds of Marxists: those who think everything is capital and those who think everything is labor. I’m the second kind. What the commodity form hides from perception is that it is always the product of socially organized labor.”
“You can conceive of writing as labor, but the problem is that I never really know what part is the work. Sure, my book would never have made it into the front window at Rizzoli bookshop if I had not been sitting at my laptop in cafes for hours. And then sometimes the writing happens while I’m dancing, or fucking, or in the shower. What part of this is labor? How does the form of life shape the form of writing?”
“The danger of writing in the third person is the flyover view which erases or suppresses the particulars it can’t totalize. The danger of writing in the first person is being confined, by voluntary or involuntary means, to the particular only, foreclosing a sense of totality at all.”
Emily Watlington, “After AI and NFTs Rise, Some Top Art & Tech Artists Log Off”, in Art in America, October 24, 2023 7:00am
“Recently, some of today’s most compelling artists and writers... have been questioning the ubiquity of seemingly inescapable consumer technology by looking to prehistory, on the premise that somewhere along the way, humankind messed up. They’re going Paleolithic, Amish, or back to the land.”
Kyle Chayka, “How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News”, in The New Yorker, October 17, 2023
“Does an advertisement count as authentic news? There is a kind of bitter absurdity to the way users have been left to determine what is accurate on their own, without the guidance of the platforms. If there is indeed an algorithmic fog of war, the tech companies seem loath to assume any responsibility for lifting it.”
Veena McCoole, “How AI Is Changing the Art Market”, in Artsy, October 26, 2023
“I see it as akin to having a smart coworker that’s with you forever, and we’ll get to a point when you won’t even be able to say whether you did it or your ‘coworker’ did.” [Diana Lee]
Richard Whiddington, “Did Duchamp Steal Credit for ‘The Fountain’ from a Woman Artist?”, in Artnet News, October 25, 2023
“Art is communication or it is nothing. Elsa’s [von Freytag-Loringhoven] Urinal blows apart all Found Object, Conceptual Art, and the millions that have been invested in it. It’s a bubble that’s about to burst.” [Julian Spalding]
Amelia Groom, “There’s No Beginning and There Is No End: Mariah Carey and the Refusal of Time”, in e-flux Journal, Issue #138, September 2023
“White-supremacist culture can try, perversely, to insist that there is a true, essential, clean, untainted, neutral, nonracialized, and universal original that comes first, while the remix is a secondary and derivative deviation with optional, added elaboration for a subcategory of listeners... The history of hip-hop, meanwhile, is a history of the mix and all that can happen in the combining, scratching, and clashing of different sounds. Sampling and remixing practices mean that songs become expansive ecologies of references and relations, and sounds are always polyphonic and multi-temporal. Even the biggest solo stars will always be accompanied by other voices; in the words of poet, dancer, and jazz archivist Harmony Holiday, hip-hop is a “friendship-based art form.””
Kyle Chayka, “Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I.”, in The New Yorker, September 26, 2023
“There is no single machine that can be smashed to disable artificial intelligence. If the physical server farms that host A.I. programs were attacked, the software could simply be hosted elsewhere. What’s more, the foundation of A.I. is the raw material that humanity has already labored to produce: reams of text and images that programs process into patterns and then remix into fresh “content.” Unlike the machines of the first Industrial Revolution, A.I. does not necessarily need more input; it can sustain itself.”
Will Douglas Heaven, “DeepMind’s cofounder: Generative AI is just a phase. What’s next is interactive AI”, in MIT Technology Review, September 15, 2023
“Technology today is static. It does, roughly speaking, what you tell it to do. But now technology is going to be animated. It’s going to have the potential freedom, if you give it, to take actions. It’s truly a step change in the history of our species that we’re creating tools that have this kind of, you know, agency.” [Mustafa Suleyman]
Hal Foster, “The Anti-Aesthetic at Forty”, in Artforum, September 2023
“Our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve [...] Postmodernism replicates or reproduces––reinforces––the logic of consumer capitalism; the more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resists that logic.” [Fredric Jameson 1982]
Michelle Santiago Cortés, “AI Abjection. Two pathways for disgust”, in Dirt, August 30, 2023
“symptoms of disgust point to the disturbance of a symbolic order. We want things to always mean what they’ve always meant—for “us” to mean “safe,” “impermeable,” and “pure.” We rely on fantasies like these to draw clear distinctions between the human and the animal, the living body and the decaying corpse, the human and the machine to maintain our sanity. So our skin tingles at the thought of its dissolving boundaries and our brains fizz at the prospect of their uselessness.
Maybe we can’t literally taste new technologies, but we do metabolize them through our bodies—our senses, nervous systems, psychologies, and undoubtedly our appetites. And that’s my favorite part about observing disgust—seeing how it transforms us, invites us to overcome ourselves and encode our world in alternate ways. To stare at the maggots until the disgusted self fades away.”
Matilda Lin Berke, “The Internet is Forever”, in Spike, September 8, 2023
“No matter where you go, you’re under constant surveillance – or potentially under constant surveillance, which we all know is the same thing.”
“Mistake culture is about the conditions of mass information. Unlike cancel culture, which is about content, mistake culture is about forms – the informatic environment by which the self is known and policed – more than it is about the consequences of said policing. Information doesn’t build or repair; it only smooths, optimizes.”
“by reinforcing the constructed nature of the self, mass information has all but obfuscated the Real.”
Samantha Cole, “The Community Pushing AI-Generated Porn to ‘the Edge of Knowledge’”, in 404, August 23, 2023
“with AI-generated porn, the makers themselves can be surprised by what comes up, even if they have a 300-word prompt with granular specificity. What’s in their mind’s eye might only be a shade of what the computer generates on the screen.”
“AI-generated erotic imagery isn’t representative of real-life sex, but it’s not comparable to erotic art drawn by humans, either. It exists in a gray area that’s more grotesque, an amalgamation of stolen images taken from places like Reddit, scraped from porn sites, and the endless fetish illustrations and art all over the internet—churned out as a hyperreal simulacra of human (and inhuman) sexuality. What AI porn makers manage to excavate from the tar pit of the internet isn’t revealed until the moment it shows up on the screen, even if the prompt is carefully crafted and specific.”
Adina Glickstein, “The Nine Lives of Cat Memes. Eva & Franco Mattes, “Fake Views” at Frankfurter Kunstverein”, in Spike, August 22, 2023
“I compulsively photograph art exhibitions, usually under the delusional belief that I’ll return to these images, one day. Most of the time, they languish in the purgatory of my camera roll. They’re nice pictures. I like them too much to delete them, so there they’ll stay: eventually buried under strata of other images, megabytes accruing into gigabytes, nestled cozily, I’m reminded by “Fake Views,” on some server rack in a physical corner of the metaphorical Cloud.”
Kenny Schachter, “ChatGPT & Me: Kenny Schachter Tries to Use AI to Write Intelligently About Art. Is It Any Good?”, in Artnet News, August 18, 2023
“The notion that the human role is diminished in the creative process the moment an artist works with a machine-learning algorithm is a vestige of a long-held prejudice towards technology in the arts.” [Kevin Abosh]
“AI and creativity have become strange bedfellows. Collaborations between human artists and intelligent machines have become all the rage. It’s like a bizarre dance, with one partner leading and the other struggling to keep up. They tango, they disco, and more often than not, they trip over each other’s virtual feet. It’s a spectacle that leaves you scratching your head, tsk-tsk-ing under your breath, and biting your lip in anticipation as to what could possibly be next.”
Elaine Velie, “The Only Good Part of NFTs Is Being Phased Out”, in Hyperallergic, August 21, 2023
“I think a lot of the creator-focused messaging was really just marketing intended to boost the popularity of NFTs,” Molly White told Hyperallergic [...] “After all, if the NFT community as a whole genuinely wanted to put creators first, these royalty-free platforms would not be enjoying the success they have, and this fee-based race to the bottom probably wouldn’t be happening.”
Devin Finzer, “Changes to creator fees on OpenSea”, in OpenSea Blog, August 17, 2023
“In November 2022, we launched the Operator Filter: a tool designed to give creators more control by restricting the sale of their collections to web3 marketplaces that enforce creator fees in secondary sales. It was meant to empower creators with greater control over their web3 business models, but it required the buy-in of everyone in the web3 ecosystem, and unfortunately that has not happened. So we’re making a few changes to our approach to creator fees [...] To be clear, creator fees aren’t going away – simply the ineffective, unilateral enforcement of them.”
Sarah Cascone, “See the Most Distant Star in the Universe—a Million Times Brighter Than the Sun—Thanks to Stunning Photos From NASA’s James Webb Telescope”, in Artnet News, August 15, 2023
“Where we had ignorance, we now have beautiful data.” [Jane Rigby, NASA Scientist]
Min Chen, “The NFT Market Has Tanked. So Why Is This Major Hollywood Talent Agency Still Betting Big on Web3 Artists?”, in Artnet News, August 15, 2023
“Yes, things ‘cooled off,’ but it’s still 70 times what it was just a couple of years ago,” he said, further explaining how the NFT market’s valuation went from $350 million in 2020 to $41 billion in 2021 to about $25 billion in 2022. “It feels like we have shifted from a sprint to a marathon.” [Chris Jacquemin, head of digital strategy at William Morris Endeavor]
Min Chen, “‘People in My World Thought It a Little Crazy’: Artist Yue Minjun on Launching His Million-Dollar NFT Collection in a Flagging Crypto Market”, in Artnet News, August 21, 2023
“I just believed it an interesting time to pursue my digital concepts within Web3 while others are running from it.” [...] “I needed to see where [the Web3 space] would settle, how it would evolve, survive even. I needed to see a little more maturity and understanding that a space to collect digital art is not the same space where you can gamble on crypto,” he said. “Now that the speculative gambling culture is not as prevalent, will people respond to my digital work the same way they’ve responded to my physical work?” [...] “Obviously, most people in my world thought it a little crazy to go into the NFT space now. The market is nowhere near what it was—for me, that’s an opportunity,” he said. “If Web3 is the future, now is the time to enter, after the hyped craziness. It has allowed me to reinvent myself in a new medium and connect with the next generation of collectors. It’s tremendously exciting.” [Yue Minjun]
Boris Groys, “From Writing to Prompting: AI as Zeitgeist-Machine”, in e-flux Notes, August 10, 2023
“the emergence and advancement of AI puts individual authorship in question. The writer—this last artisan amidst the industrialized world—sees their work drowning in an ocean of machine-produced texts. The reader cannot know any more if a particular text is written by a human author or produced by AI.”
“the AI-generated text or image is an interpretation of the authorial intent of the prompt. Accordingly, this intent should be formulated clearly so that AI can adequately understand it. In a seemingly paradoxical way, the practice of prompting brings us back to the classical figure of the author—the figure that was put into question by the discourse of deconstruction.”
“if, as a writer, I write a prompt and the AI produces a text or image prompted by this prompt, I can immediately see how my text is understood and interpreted at this particular historical moment—not by a particular individual or group but by the whole civilization in which I live. AI is nothing other than the embodied zeitgeist. And by prompting this zeitgeist-machine, I am able to analyze and diagnose the moment of history to which I am contemporary.”
“if the accumulated mass of writing and documentation is not accessible to the human mind, it is accessible to AI. Today, prompting seems to be the only way to communicate with this “objectified writing”—this embodied zeitgeist.”
Shane Denson, “HOW DOES IT MAKE YOU FEEL?”, in Outland, July 26, 2023
“Though often judged by its spectacular images, AI art needs also to be regarded in terms of its materiality, its temporality, and its relation to embodied, tactile existence. The human body plays a central role in processing contemporary artworks that use machine learning algorithms to generate their images, serving as a kind of presubjective filter through which the generated stimuli—often too many in number, their motion and calculation too fast or too minute for conscious perception—are strained.”
Anastasia Berg, “On the Aesthetic Turn”, in The Point, Issue 30, July 19, 2023
“In the fairy tales we tell ourselves about art, we imagine that the images of the artist can set us free: from the quotidian tedium of everyday life, from ignorance, from moral turpitude. But in their ability to make contact with the strangest, most hidden parts of ourselves, images can themselves beguile and entrap us... Images can feed our narcissism, divert our thoughts, seduce us, delude us morally, constrict our imaginations—and yet we can never seem to get enough.
If good art and its criticism can free us from anything, it can free us, first and foremost, from the totalizing fantasies that are fed by such images... It can liberate us, in other words, from the comforting delusion that we can ever transcend our human limits, defeat death, unhappiness and evil once and for all, or live in anyone’s vision of heaven on earth. This does not mean, however, that we can ever be liberated from the infinite pull of beauty itself, or be able to attend to images only when we feel like it. It is rather like this: we can decide what to do, but we can never decide what to dream.”
Alexander Provan, “Who's Afraid of Deepfake Kim Kardashian?”, in Frieze, August 9, 2023
“To paraphrase the counterfeit Kardashian: what else is the artist to do if reality is an endless stream of content to be interpreted, manipulated, organized and framed, and if identities are fungible commodities? This question tends to be side-stepped in the current debates about AI, art and creativity. Generally, AI is said to be either a boon to the species, augmenting our brains and offloading the tedious tasks of searching, sorting and synthesizing, or else an existential threat to the ineffable processes – as well as the underlying labour and social ties – that constitute culture. The two camps tend to agree that creativity will come to mean something different, even if the rise of Basquiat bots does not result in the extinction of old-fashioned artists (the ones who do not merely sort and synthesize but create).”
Jo Lawson-Tancred, “Can a Digital Artwork Outlast a 19th-Century Painting? The Answer Is Complicated as Artists, Dealers, and Conservators Battle Obsolescence in the Field”, in Artnet News, August 9, 2023
“Today, “the reason hardware has stopped working isn’t because it’s broken per se, it’s because some kind of obsolescence has been introduced by the corporation that made it.” [Fino-Radin] The same is true of software, which can have its license expire, be dependent on other outdated softwares, or suddenly introduce a subscription fee. “We have less trouble with the ’90s artworks than today’s,” agreed Morgan Stricot, head of digital conservation at the ZKM Karlsruhe.”
Scott Alexander, “The Extinction Tournament”, in Astral Codex Ten, July 20, 2023
“Should we update our risk of human extinction downward?”
Douglas Dodds, “THE INTERVIEW | A. MICHAEL NOLL”, in Right Click Save, July 10, 2023
“Billy Klüver got involved with Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), and he believed that engineers had to collaborate and work with artists. They couldn’t do both — there had to be two people. All the shows he did attracted a considerable amount of attention in the New York area. And then Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon did the Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I) (1967) and that attracted even more attention. It was hard to compete with that Nude, which exhausted the interest in computer art and, I think, slowed the whole thing down. It’s also unquestionably sexist. In my mind, the Experiments in Art and Technology was a disaster. Most of the technology never worked right, but because it involved Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg it grabbed the attention of the big money in New York.”
Kyle Chayka, “My A.I. Writing Robot”, in The New Yorker, July 11, 2023
“Putting a verb after a subject or padding out a sentence with adjectives is a task that machines can accomplish, because such grammatical probabilities can be calculated. Insight isn’t as easy to automate, because it’s something that deepens with time, through the process of getting words down on the page. As Flusser put it, “Only one who writes lines can think logically, calculate, criticize, pursue knowledge, philosophize.” The most unsettling aspect of A.I.-generated text is how it tries to divorce the act of writing from the effort of doing it, which is to say, from the processes of thought itself.”
Julian Lucas, “The Puzzle of Putting Video Games in a Museum”, in The New Yorker, June 30, 2023
“Games... cannot be judged solely in terms of their scores, stories, scenery, and other constituent arts. If we want to understand what makes them unique, we must study their mechanics.”
“Although several peer institutions have exhibited games, MOMA is one of very few art museums to build them into its permanent collection, a process that isn’t quite as simple as waiting for the next sale on Steam. “We establish a relationship with the production company, we make sure we’ll have the right to migrate the game and emulate it ourselves,” Antonelli has explained. “It’s a really big scaffold.” In many cases, MOMA has acquired not only games but also their original hardware platforms—and, whenever possible, their source code, which is often quite challenging to obtain.”
REX WOODBURY AND JARYD HERMANN, “How Roblox Grows: From Virtual Playground to Global Empire”, in Digital Native, June 29, 2023
“Gaming is bigger than the box office, streaming video, and recorded music industries combined—and growing much faster. Gaming has become the largest category of media, with over 3B gamers globally.”
“As games get more immersive, the lines blur between social and gaming. This isn’t new: as long as sandbox games have been around (games that give players lots of creative freedom), gaming has trended toward socialization, sometimes even losing gameplay altogether.”
“Companies like Roblox don’t create any games—players create their own games and earn a share of revenue. This significantly de-risks an investment: there are over 40 million games on Roblox, with the top 10 games representing only ~30-40% of revenue.”
“Roblox is less a gaming company than a next-generation social network—a platform for building and sharing immersive virtual environments. This continues the internet’s march toward ever-more-immersive content.”
James Vincent, “AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born”, in The Verge, June 26, 2023
“Given money and compute, AI systems — particularly the generative models currently in vogue — scale effortlessly. They produce text and images in abundance, and soon, music and video, too. Their output can potentially overrun or outcompete the platforms we rely on for news, information, and entertainment. But the quality of these systems is often poor, and they’re built in a way that is parasitical on the web today... This product then competes for attention with the platforms and people that came before them.”
“There’s a famous essay in the field of machine learning known as “The Bitter Lesson,” which notes that decades of research prove that the best way to improve AI systems is not by trying to engineer intelligence but by simply throwing more computer power and data at the problem. The lesson is bitter because it shows that machine scale beats human curation. And the same might be true of the web.”
Katie White, “Rising Talent Bea Scaccia’s Otherworldly Paintings Capture the Harmony—and Tension—Between Beauty and Monstrosity”, in Artnet News, June 29, 2023
“Right now, we’re living in a Baroque period full of turmoil and scientific discovery...We’ve lost everything that was the animal part of us and so we wear it as the protection that we need.”
Evgeny Morozov, “The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence”, in The New York Times, June 30, 2023
“Depending on how (and if) the robot rebellion unfolds, A.G.I. may or may not prove an existential threat. But with its antisocial bent and its neoliberal biases, A.G.I.-ism already is: We don’t need to wait for the magic Roombas to question its tenets.”
Josh Dzieza, “AI Is a Lot of Work”, in The Verge, June 20, 2023
“Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping... The current AI boom... began with an unprecedented feat of tedious and repetitive labor.”
“The more AI systems are put out into the world to dispense legal advice and medical help, the more edge cases they will encounter and the more humans will be needed to sort them.”
“This tangled supply chain is deliberately hard to map. According to people in the industry, the companies buying the data demand strict confidentiality... Annotation reveals too much about the systems being developed, and the huge number of workers required makes leaks difficult to prevent. Annotators are warned repeatedly not to tell anyone about their jobs... there are no granular estimates of the number of people who work in annotation, but it is a lot, and it is growing. A recent Google Research paper gave an order-of-magnitude figure of “millions” with the potential to become “billions.””
“When AI comes for your job, you may not lose it, but it might become more alien, more isolating, more tedious.”
“The act of simplifying reality for a machine results in a great deal of complexity for the human.”
“The job of the annotator often involves putting human understanding aside and following instructions very, very literally — to think, as one annotator said, like a robot. It’s a strange mental space to inhabit, doing your best to follow nonsensical but rigorous rules.”
“ChatGPT seems so human because it was trained by an AI that was mimicking humans who were rating an AI that was mimicking humans who were pretending to be a better version of an AI that was trained on human writing. This circuitous technique is called “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” or RLHF.”
“Until recently, it was relatively easy to spot bad output from a language model. It looked like gibberish. But this gets harder as the models get better — a problem called “scalable oversight.””
“One way the AI industry differs from manufacturers of phones and cars is in its fluidity. The work is constantly changing, constantly getting automated away and replaced with new needs for new types of data. It’s an assembly line but one that can be endlessly and instantly reconfigured, moving to wherever there is the right combination of skills, bandwidth, and wages.”
Ahmed Elgammal, “Text-to-Image Generators Have Altered the Digital Art Landscape—But Killed Creativity. Here’s Why an Era of A.I. Art Is Over”, in Artnet News, June 20, 2023
“A.I. does not make art; it makes images. What makes these generated images art is the human artists behind A.I.—the artists who fed data to the machine, played with its knobs, and curated the output. So, I am using the term “A.I. Art” to talk about human art that uses A.I. as part of the creative process, with various degrees of autonomy. We are entering an era of massive use of such tools. However, the era when these tools struck a spark of artistic genius might be behind us.”
“In 2017, when we trained a GAN on classical portraits from Western art, it created some troubling, deformed portraits, which reminded me of Francis Bacon’s 1963 portraits of Henreitta Moraes. However, there is one fundamental difference: Bacon had the intention of making his portrait deformed, while A.I. simply failed to make a portrait as was instructed. With GANs, we entered the era of machine failure aesthetics.”
“One fundamental difference between early A.I. models and today’s prompt-based models, is that earlier models could be trained on smaller sets of images. This made it possible for artists to train their own A.I. models based on their own visual references. Today’s prompt-based models are pre-trained on billions of images taken from the internet without artist consent.”
“Text-promoting helped A.I. get out of the uncanny valley. But it killed the surprise. This is because these models are trained on both text and images together, and learn to correlate visual concepts with language semantics. This makes the models better at creating figures and imitating styles that can be described in words.”
“A.I. is becoming a tool for massive image generation, not the exciting co-creative partner that excites artists with new ideas. A.I. is becoming very good at following the rules, but the artistic spark in it is gone. Artists will have to dig deeper, go beyond prompting, and use A.I. differently to find it.”
Sam Venis, “COPYRIGHT AND POSTMODERNISM IN THE AGE OF DALL·E”, in Spike, June 20, 2023
“When everything is a potential data point, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish what, exactly, derives from what, and to what extent that derivation has occurred... To what extent does being “trained” on an image translate into the production of new ones? And how does that connect to revenue, and, by extension, the amount owed to artists? (Especially given that many of the companies producing AI-generated media don’t currently make any profits).”
“The ruling against the Warhol Foundation isn’t an attack on the creative process, but part of a wider effort to entrench the integrity of the copyright system, and to compensate creators for their role in producing referential work. While this may affect some artists in the short term – causing them to think twice before they use someone else’s material in a licensing context – this case should be understood as part of the looming battle against the real antagonists: the technologists who want to swallow the world whole.”
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “The Completion”, in e-flux Journal, Issue #137, June 2023
“In conditions of competition and war, all technical transformations that increase productive or destructive power are destined to be implemented. This means that it is no longer possible to stop the self-construction of the global automaton.”
“We can distinguish three dimensions of reality: the existing, the possible, and the necessary. The existing (or contingent) has the character of chaos. The evolution of the existing follows the lines of the possible, or those of the necessary. The possible is a projection of will and imagination. The necessary is implicit in the strength of biology, and now also in the strength of the logical machine. The cognitive automaton allows us to foresee the extermination of the contingent by the necessary, which naturally implies an annulment of the possible, because there is no possible without the contingency of the existent.”
Terry Nguyen, “Sarah Palin Forever”, in Dirt, June 15, 2023
“Extinction is a distraction from other conversations.”
Yuk Hui, “ChatGPT, or the Eschatology of Machines”, in e-flux Journal, Issue #137, June 2023
”the novelty and significance of artificial intelligence is buried by the eschatological imaginary, by modern stereotypes of machines and industrial propaganda... fighting against climate change should be our top priority, as should be developing a productive relation between humans and technology.”
“Simondon, in his 1958 book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, rightly observed that the replacement of thermodynamic machines by information machines marks a critical moment: human displacement from the center of production... In the era of information machines, or cybernetic machines, the machine itself becomes the organizer of information and the human is no longer at the center, even if they still consider themself the commander of machines and organizer of information. This is the moment when the human suffers from their own stereotypical beliefs about machines: they falsely identify themself as the center, and in so doing, they face constant frustration and a panicked search for identity.”
“Humans live within the industry’s self-fulfilling prophecy of replacement. And indeed, the industry constantly reproduces the discourse of replacement by announcing the end of this or that job as if a revolution had arrived, while the social structure and our social imaginary remain unchanged.”
“Instead of elaborating a vision of the future in which artificial intelligence serves a prosthetic function, the dominant discourse treats it merely as challenging human intelligence and replacing intellectual labor. Today’s humans fail to dream.”
“The prosthetic nature of technology must be affirmed beyond its functionality, for since the beginning of humanity, access to truth has always depended on the invention and use of tools. This fact remains invisible to many, which makes the conflict between machine evolution and human existence seem to originate from an ideology deeply rooted in culture.”
“Instead of suspending the development of AI, suspend the anthropomorphic stereotyping of machines and develop an adequate culture of prosthesis... Instead of mystifying machines and humanity, understand our current technical reality and its relation to diverse human realities, so that this technical reality can be integrated with them to maintain and reproduce biodiversity, noodiversity, and technodiversity.”
Daniel Rubinstein, “What is 21st Century Photography?”, in The Photographer's Gallery, February 7, 2018
“in the 21st Century this representational world order inaugurated by Newton’s laws of motion, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and parliamentary (representational) democracy, the “photographic camera” has already come to the end of its life. Even if some parts of this form of photography are still visible, they are in a state of advanced decay; maintaining a holding pattern, while simultaneously being transformed by a new set of forces.”
“In this new age of thinking machines, algorithmic processing, and vast computational speeds, a dramatic change is happening to the visual field. The industrial age was an age of universal visibility... Photography had a clear-cut role in this optical regime...”
“in a post-Fordist society the locus of political agency and of cultural relevance has shifted from the object – as visually arresting as it might be – to the processes that (re)produce and distribute the object. Processes, however, by their own nature, are less visible and less representational than objects. For that reason, it seems to me that if photography mainly concerns itself with representations of objects in space, it is losing its relevance in a world in which speed, acceleration, distribution and self-replication acquire a significance that overshadows the visual appearance of spaces.”
“both materiality and humanity must be re-evaluated in the light of these bio-techno-political developments.”
“There is no need for fear or hope, only to look for new weapons.” Gilles Deleuze
“In the 21st Century, photography is not a stale sight for sore eyes, but the inquiry into what makes something an image. As such, photography is the most essential task of art in the current time.”
Marc Andreessen, “Why AI Will Save the World”, in a16z, June 6, 2023
“anything that people do with their natural intelligence today can be done much better with AI, and we will be able to take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel.”
““Bootleggers” are the self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them from competitors... For AI risk, these are CEOs who stand to make more money if regulatory barriers are erected that form a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startup and open source competition – the software version of “too big to fail” banks.”
“My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people. The idea that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it has motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious handwave. In short, AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. And AI is a machine – is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will.”
“Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.” John Von Neumann
“The AI cat is obviously already out of the bag. You can learn how to build AI from thousands of free online courses, books, papers, and videos, and there are outstanding open source implementations proliferating by the day. AI is like air – it will be everywhere. The level of totalitarian oppression that would be required to arrest that would be so draconian... that we would not have a society left to protect.”
“The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not... We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure that China does not.”
Anna Wiener, “The Age of Chat”, in The New Yorker, June 17, 2023
“A big reason that OpenAI needs you to keep your inputs within the bounds of a typical conversational style is that it enables them to more effectively police the output of the model. The model only acts remotely predictably when the user acts predictably.” Colin Fraser, a data scientist at Meta
“With today’s chatbots, human users are not really speaking; they are prompting... High-quality inputs are rewarded with high-quality outputs; the software is a kind of mirror. What’s happening is data exchange between user and bot—but it is also a mutual manipulation, a flywheel, an ouroboros.”
ACI, “The Hybrid Mind”, in Outland, June 8, 2023
“it seems totally reasonable that within a few years we will see the rise of a new avant-garde, composed primarily of human-AI agents, or even just superintelligent hipster AIs that produce an autonomous form of artistic expression capable of writing itself into and out of existence.”
“Being alive means making art and now is when the fun really begins.”
Prabha Kannan, “Another Warning Letter from A.I. Researchers and Executives”, in The New Yorker, June 12, 2023
“So, while we continue down a capitalist path of throwing endless resources at the development of these humanlike systems at breakneck speeds, basically guaranteeing our own demise, we are also taking a moment to write, sign, and publish this very important letter that will hopefully absolve us of any responsibility for our own actions.”
Pietro Minto, “Link Molto Belli: Il plurale di Svezia”, 10 giugno 2023
“Il metaverso di Meta, ammesso esista ancora, e lo spatial computing di Apple sono pensati per un futuro plumbeo, fatto di filtri per ripulire l’aria, occhialoni per rimpiazzare l’ufficio, lockdown ambientali e altri spunti per romanzetti distopici.”
Heather Dewey-Hagborg, “Generative Representation”, in Unthinking Photography, December 17, 2018
“is forensic DNA phenotyping a photographic process? The question is significant because photography generally implies a subject which can be represented; it seems to have a certain claim on ‘reality’... Generative representation is the production of images that appear ‘real’, although they are constructed using completely artificial means. It describes the way in which an algorithmically produced image, like a portrait, might feel like an index to a real world subject, even though it is entirely contrived. This phenomenon gives the generative image an authority that is essentially borrowed from the long history and tremendous power of representation in modernity.”
“As daily life becomes increasingly abstracted, virtual, informatic and algorithmic, representation begins to lose its stability. We live in a world of images but the character of those images has morphed into an “immersive economy”. The image is a computational product, the outcome of an algorithmic process.”
“There is therefore a danger in seeing models as simply a new form of representation, because what they actually do, the way they function and act in society is fundamentally different. The model is shapeshifting. It can adopt a host of forms each of which may appear as certain, accurate, and as true as the last, but in reality the model is a constellation; a fluid space of possibility.”
“generative representation: the production of an image that feels real, that feels even like a direct representation, but is in actuality a phantom.”
Lev Manovich, “Towards ‘General Artistic Intelligence’?”, in Art Basel, June 1, 2023
“while we can endlessly debate if AI is ‘creative’ or not, it is already fully ‘professional’; technically more accomplished than many art students and adult artists.”
“Kitsch, in other words, is melodramatic, shows only stereotypes, and lacks originality. This, to me, is an excellent description of the default images produced by AI tools.”
“Before we dismiss vernacular AI visual culture as completely derivative and unauthentic, consider how important copying has always been in human cultures. Historically, image making was often about making copies or variations... The universe of AI imagery created by amateurs today reminds us of how cultures have always operated: through constant imitation and small modifications.”
Max Cozloff, “MEN AND MACHINES”, in Artforum, February 1969
“our onetime extensions, the machines, are becoming our present competitors; ... control and responsibility are becoming too vulnerably compressed; and ... increased services by our goods and systems tend more to regulate than to liberate us. In other words, the greater our creativity in utilizing nonhuman sources of power, in an effort to free ourselves from unnecessary labor, the more suddenly necessary patterns of dependence come into existence.”
Hannah Baer, “Projective Reality”, in Artforum, Summer 2023
“The way we conceptualize intelligence is rooted in the assumption of violence... underneath the perceived threat of AI is an assumption that greater intelligence means more domination, and less intelligence means subjugation. These assumptions are woven into our basic cultural sensibilities.”
“If we understand that the way we see AI tells us more about ourselves and our histories and values than it does about the machine, perhaps we can also invite it to help us transcend.”
Mario Carpo, “IMITATION GAMES”, in Artforum, Summer 2023
“AI-driven image-making—far from heralding some future post-human development—appears to be actually reviving long-dormant visual strategies that dominated the arts, and art theories, of the past.”
“visual imitation and style transfer are what AI based image-making technologies basically do, and so do we when we use them. It therefore stands to reason that AI scientists trying to replicate, with mathematical means, some core, and apparently timeless, operations of the human mind felt at some point the instrumental need to call on those ancient terms. What computer scientists probably didn’t know (unless also trained in comparative literature or married to an art historian) is that the terms imitation and style have been controversial in the humanities for most of the twentieth century.”
“There is therefore a certain irony in that the latest avatar of electronic technologies may now foster a revival of art theory tropes that twentieth-century modernism tried to eliminate from the visual culture of the machine-made environment. Imitation and style, which modernists had rejected from art theory, are coming back to art practice through the window of technology.”
“As technology now begins to automate imitation, thus endorsing and generalizing its uses, we must revive some critical awareness of what imitation means, how it works, and how we can work with it. As with all tools, artificial intelligence, whether generative or not, can only be as intelligent as the tasks to which we put it.”
Tina Rivers Ryan, “BINARY PLASTIC LANGUAGE”, in Artforum, Summer 2023
“WHAT IF WE BEGAN the story of digital art not with a screen but with a canvas?”
“Each work is framed as not simply a technical demonstration but a manifestation of a particular artist’s project. And it is the artists’ judgments—including about which materials to use or which outputs to display or throw away—that help give the works here a meaning beyond what they teach us about the history of computing.”
“As Britt Salvesen notes in her catalogue essay on the computer-generated films in “Coded,” an overemphasis on the how of computer art tends to distract us from the why.”
Ben Davis, “Why Andy Warhol’s ‘Prince’ Is Actually Bad, and the Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith Decision Is Actually Good”, in Artnet News, June 1, 2023
“The question of lazy, un-creative uses of appropriation by powerful artists who are out of ideas and would like to coast on other people’s unique works is as important to address as the question of actual creative uses of appropriation!”
“The new wave of generative A.I. is essentially a doomsday device crafted to demolish every form of stable protection for unique creative works. Trained on unthinkably huge amounts of often copyrighted materials, and capable of creative feats at speed, it sells the magical ability to target anything and remix it just enough so that you don’t need to worry about credit or compensation for any original labor, for whatever “use” you want.”
Erik Salvaggio, “We Need To Come Back From The Future”, in Cybernetic Forests, June 4, 2023
“AI is not a threat to human survival, or the folks writing these letters would just stop developing it and focus on limiting it, rather than writing letters about how they really ought to stop.”
“the problem of these existential concerns — over the local, immediate concerns — is one of culture. The culture of the safety engineer, focused on abstract future catastrophes with unarticulated causes, is increasingly prioritized over the culture of the harmed, who exist on the peripheries of algorithmic impacts.”
Federico Campagna, “Tomorrow's Myths”, in Art and Education, May 2023
“We come into the world completely unaware, unprepared, and baffled. What are we doing here? What is “here”? And who are we? Through the years of our education, we are taught, not how to resolve these existential questions, but a series of techniques with which we can cope with their insolubility. These techniques, going under the general name of “knowledge” (scientific, technical, psychological, political, etc.), consist in a series of powerful narratives through which we might be able to suspend our disbelief towards our absurd existential condition: being “alive”, within a “body” and a “personality,” inside a “world,” at a “time” and a “space,” all of whose actual material referents remain obscure.”
“But at times... these narratives... cease being perceived as narratives, becoming instead “facts.” This ideological turn, which appears to endow us with a firm grasp on the true “nature” of the world, affords a great deal of tranquility. We cease questioning the unsettling mystery in which we are steeped, and we cease tormenting ourselves about the limits of our understanding. But this tranquility comes at a cost. It requires that we accept being imprisoned within the narratives with which we have wrapped reality. Tranquility in exchange for freedom: the eternal dilemma.”
Kate Knibbs, “Why Does AI Art Look Like a ’70s Prog-Rock Album Cover?”, in Wired, January 28, 2023
“The rhetoric from these companies is that you can make anything you can imagine. It’s about this open frontier. But, of course, popular culture follows particular stereotypes and tropes” Lev Manovich
John Harris, “‘There was all sorts of toxic behaviour’: Timnit Gebru on her sacking by Google, AI’s dangers and big tech’s biases”, in The Guardian, May 22, 2023
“In accepting large amounts of web text as ‘representative’ of ‘all’ of humanity, we risk perpetuating dominant viewpoints, increasing power imbalances and further reifying inequality.” Gebru, Mitchell et al
“AI is not magic. There are a lot of people involved – humans.”
“That conversation ascribes agency to a tool rather than the humans building the tool... That means you can abdicate responsibility: ‘It’s not me that’s the problem. It’s the tool. It’s super-powerful. We don’t know what it’s going to do.’ Well, no – it’s you that’s the problem. You’re building something with certain characteristics for your profit. That’s extremely distracting, and it takes the attention away from real harms and things that we need to do. Right now.”
Alice Bucknell, “No Hard Reset: Against The Crypto Utopia”, 2023
“Like other technologies, blockchain urbanism cannot replace the fundamentals of urban development, which is a human-centered approach. Without the social integration of this technology across all sectors, it’s not a city: it’s just a solution in search of a problem.”
“There is an unavoidable paradox to blockchain urbanism... blockchain technology... was designed from the Hobbesian worldview that humans are corruptible, selfish creatures. The distributed ledger architecture of blockchain is, as Nakamoto says in their original white paper, “a system built with the assumption that no person, authority, or institution can be trusted.” So how can a technology built upon a misanthropic worldview guide us seamlessly into the utopian cities of tomorrow?”
Brian Boucher, “A New NFT and ‘Speculative Reality’ Puzzle From Artist Trevor Paglen Sends Users on a Dark, Mind Control-Themed Treasure Hunt”, in Artnet News, May 12, 2023
“Here’s 10,000 people who all talk to each other,” he said, referring to the community of digital-art fans. “To build CYCLOPS, in order to play this game, you need 1,000 people who are talking to each other. NFTs have a bunch of nerds hanging out on Discord servers. I was thinking about audience in a different way. What I was asking was, ‘How do you make public art for people who live in the Internet?’”
Naomi Klein, “AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are”, in The Guardian, May 8, 2023
“but why call the errors “hallucinations” at all? Why not algorithmic junk? Or glitches? Well, hallucination refers to the mysterious capacity of the human brain to perceive phenomena that are not present, at least not in conventional, materialist terms. By appropriating a word commonly used in psychology, psychedelics and various forms of mysticism, AI’s boosters, while acknowledging the fallibility of their machines, are simultaneously feeding the sector’s most cherished mythology: that by building these large language models, and training them on everything that we humans have written, said and represented visually, they are in the process of birthing an animate intelligence on the cusp of sparking an evolutionary leap for our species.”
“What work are these benevolent stories doing in the culture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history. Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent.”
“Silicon Valley routinely calls theft “disruption” – and too often gets away with it. We know this move: charge ahead into lawless territory; claim the old rules don’t apply to your new tech; scream that regulation will only help China – all while you get your facts solidly on the ground. By the time we all get over the novelty of these new toys and start taking stock of the social, political and economic wreckage, the tech is already so ubiquitous that the courts and policymakers throw up their hands.”
“It’s also why their hallucinations about all the wonderful things that AI will do for humanity are so important. Because those lofty claims disguise this mass theft as a gift.”
“this new tech will be used in the same ways as the last generation of digital tools: that what begins with lofty promises about spreading freedom and democracy ends up micro targeting ads at us so that we buy more useless, carbon-spewing stuff.”
“We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists. It means that those people will find themselves staring into the abyss – with actual artists among the first to fall.”
“A world of deep fakes, mimicry loops and worsening inequality is not an inevitability. It’s a set of policy choices. We can regulate the current form of vampiric chatbots out of existence – and begin to build the world in which AI’s most exciting promises would be more than Silicon Valley hallucinations.”
Santiago Zabala, Claudio Gallo, “What is the political agenda of artificial intelligence?”, in Al Jazeera, 17 May 2023
“AI appears to be here to stay. And its political agenda is fully synchronised with that of free market capitalism, the principal (undeclared) goal and purpose of which is to tear apart any form of social solidarity and community. The danger of AI... is that this undeniably monumental invention appears to be basing all its decisions and actions on the same destructive and dangerous values that drive predatory capitalism.”
Claire L. Evans, “There’s Nothing Unnatural About a Computer”, in Grow, The Futures Issue, 2023
“I don’t think there is such a thing as an artificial intelligence. There are multiple intelligences, many ways of doing intelligence. What I envisage to be more useful and interesting than artificial intelligence as we currently conceive of it—which is this incredibly reduced version of human intelligence— is something more distributed, more widely empowered, and more diverse than singular intelligence would allow for.”
“There’s nothing unnatural about a computer. It’s just another different way of putting silicon and hydrocarbons and a bunch of other stuff together to do things, just as evolution has put together all kinds of other interesting forms.”
“artificial intelligence can only ever be a subset of human intelligence. It lacks any other kind of access to the world.”
“the way that I think about it is that intelligence is relational. It’s not something that exists within bodies, but between them. Or between beings, or between awarenesses, or between beings and things, between beings and places. I wouldn’t even necessarily restrict it to bodies. But intelligence without relationships — I don’t think I could really understand what that is.”
Terry Nguyen, “The AI writer”, in Dirt, Apr 28, 2023
“creative work is tied to a sense of purpose. It transcends the purely transactional nature of labor. I write for a living; I also live to write. The threat of AI, then, begins to feel personal, even if its implementation is strictly business.”
Min Chen, “How Digital Artist 0xDEAFBEEF’s New NFT Project Reimagines Muybridge’s 19th-Century Motion Studies for the Blockchain”, in Artnet News, May 4, 2023
“That’s a great use, but only one use of the rich potential of programmable blockchains, which I see more generally as a means of structuring social interactions around a common reference point,” he added. “I think the participatory/interactive dimension is a unique affordance of this medium and worth exploring, as it has been by many artists.” 0xDEAFBEEF
Will Oremus, “He wrote a book on a rare subject. Then a ChatGPT replica appeared on Amazon”, in The Washington Post, May 5, 2023
“From product reviews to recipes to blog posts and press releases, human authorship of online material is on track to become the exception rather than the norm. “If you have a connection to the internet, you have consumed AI-generated content,” said Jonathan Greenglass, a New York-based tech investor focused on e-commerce. “It’s already here.””
“Without grounding, the system can make stuff up. And if it’s that same made-up thing all over the world, how do you trace it back to what reality is?” Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI start-up Hugging Face
“That business is driven by a simple equation: how much it costs to create an article vs. how much revenue it can bring in. The main goal is to attract as many clicks as possible, then serve the readers ads worth just fractions of a cent on each visit — the classic form of clickbait.”
Joshua Citarella, “The Platform Wars”, 10 mag 2023
“The Platform Wars is a stage of social media where platforms viciously compete for data and users by locking out features and the ability to move between these now distinct spheres. While this somewhat existed before, it will soon massively ramp up.”
“Right now, I’m writing on Substack. Later I will post the article to Twitter. Then I will screenshot it and post to Instagram Stories. After, I’ll remediate the text to Patreon which I will post in the Discord that will notify everyone when I’m live on Twitch likely reading this very post... This increased level of administrative friction will slowly disincentivize creators from posting on every platform and lead them to optimize for a select few. Perhaps even just one.”
Ben Davis, “An Artist Asked ChatGPT How to Make a Popular Memecoin. The Result Is ‘TurboToad,’ and People Are Betting Millions of Dollars on It”, in Artnet News, May 9, 2023
“This year has been really dead. I have really been struggling to get eyeballs on my art.” Rhett Mankind
Ted Chiang, “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?”, in The New Yorker, May 4, 2023
“As it is currently deployed, A.I. often amounts to an effort to analyze a task that human beings perform and figure out a way to replace the human being. Coincidentally, this is exactly the type of problem that management wants solved. As a result, A.I. assists capital at the expense of labor... Can A.I. do anything to assist workers instead of management?”
“If we cannot come up with ways for A.I. to reduce the concentration of wealth, then I’d say it’s hard to argue that A.I. is a neutral technology, let alone a beneficial one.”
“If there is any lesson that we should take from stories about genies granting wishes, it’s that the desire to get something without effort is the real problem... The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumption that more technology is always better, and the belief that they can continue with business as usual and everything will simply work itself out.”
Dave Troy, “The Wide Angle: Understanding TESCREAL — the Weird Ideologies Behind Silicon Valley’s Rightward Turn”, The Washington Spectator, May 1, 2023
“Dr. Timnit Gebru, a prominent AI researcher... has partnered with other researchers and philosophers to coin the (somewhat unwieldy) acronym “TESCREAL” to describe the overlapping emergent belief systems that characterize the contrarian, AI-centric worldviews challenging progressivism. It stands for: Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.”
“The biggest risk AI poses right now is that alarmists will use the fears surrounding it as a cudgel to enact sweeping policy reforms. We should resist those efforts. Now more than ever, we should be guided by expertise, facts, and evidence as we seek to use technology in ways that benefit everyone.”
Adam Lindemann, “‘I Have Sold More Than 30 Million Dollars in NFTs’: Iconoclastic Digital Artist Refik Anadol in Conversation With Collector Adam Lindemann”, in Artnet News, May 3, 2023
“being on the edge of technological innovation allows us to make things that have never been seen.”
[On Jerry Saltz's review] “I think it’s a very common pattern for people who are pushing the boundaries of new things to face this. I think these are self-anointed gatekeepers: people not ready for change, not ready for a new world. I’ve always encountered those people in my journey since the beginning. It’s a very common pattern for me, so I didn’t feel it was fresh at all.”
“Art is art, and it won’t be affected by the medium in which it is exhibited.”
“Restrict AI Illustration from Publishing: An Open Letter”, in Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting, May 2, 2023
“AI-art generators are trained on enormous datasets, containing millions upon millions of copyrighted images, harvested without their creator’s knowledge, let alone compensation or consent. This is effectively the greatest art heist in history. Perpetrated by respectable-seeming corporate entities backed by Silicon Valley venture capital. It’s daylight robbery.”
“Generative AI art is vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists. Over time, this will impoverish our visual culture. Consumers will be trained to accept this art-looking art, but the ingenuity, the personal vision, the individual sensibility, the humanity will be missing.”
Hito Steyerl, “The Fifth Wall”, in HAU, November 2021
“pandemia left people little choice but to perform on corporate stages, and in the process become readable and transparent to them.”
Valentino Catricalà, “Rebecca Allen and the Birth of Virtual Reality”, in Right Click Save, April 28, 2023
“even today, nobody knows how consciousness works and yet we’re developing virtual and augmented reality. I find it interesting that we’re doing all this without really even knowing how our own reality works.”
Douglas Rushkoff, “The Day the Dotcom Bust Began”, in Medium, March 8, 2023
“the overwhelming consensus was that we were witnessing a tide change in business history: the young eating the mature, new media conquering old media, creative destruction, the dawn of the digital economy, or the Internet Revolution.”
Lee Vinsel, “You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype”, in Medium, February 1, 2021
“I’ve become increasingly aware of critical writing that is parasitic upon and even inflates hype... The kinds of critics that I am talking about invert boosters’ messages — they retain the picture of extraordinary change but focus instead on negative problems and risks. It’s as if they take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes.”
“wishful worries are a kind of entertainment. We are, after all, a people that regularly feasts upon dystopian science fiction. Imaginary fears can be fun.”
“at the worst, what these researchers do is take the sensational claims of boosters and entrepreneurs, flip them, and start talking about “risks.” They become the professional concern trolls of technoculture.”
“I will refer to criticism that both feeds and feeds on hype as criti-hype, a term I find both absurd and ugly-cute, like a pug. (Criti-hype is less mean than the alternative, hype-o-crit, though the latter is often more accurate.)”
“The problems I explore below develop when people begin working on the ethics and governance of technological situations that aren’t real — and not just “aren’t real” in the sense aren’t yet real but aren’t even realistic projections of where the science and technology is headed. Criti-hypers play up fantastic worries to offer solutions, and as we’ll see, often they do this for reasons of self-interest —including self-interest as in $$$$$$$$$$.”
“innovation-speak distracts us from ordinary problems of technology and infrastructure, including maintenance, repair, and mundane labor. We need to be more honest and reflexive about how innovation-speak has shaped academic social science and humanities research.”
Will Douglas Heaven, “Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build”, in MIT Technology Review, May 2, 2023
“Hinton says that the new generation of large language models—especially GPT-4, which OpenAI released in March—has made him realize that machines are on track to be a lot smarter than he thought they’d be. And he’s scared about how that might play out. “These things are totally different from us,” he says. “Sometimes I think it’s as if aliens had landed and people haven’t realized because they speak very good English.””
“For 40 years, Hinton has seen artificial neural networks as a poor attempt to mimic biological ones. Now he thinks that’s changed: in trying to mimic what biological brains do, he thinks, we’ve come up with something better. “It’s scary when you see that,” he says. “It’s a sudden flip.””
“Hinton now thinks there are two types of intelligence in the world: animal brains and neural networks. “It’s a completely different form of intelligence,” he says. “A new and better form of intelligence.””
““I have suddenly switched my views on whether these things are going to be more intelligent than us. I think they’re very close to it now and they will be much more intelligent than us in the future,” he says. “How do we survive that?””
Stefano Quintarelli, “Let’s forget the term AI. Let’s call them Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences (SALAMI)”, November 24, 2019
“the first and foremost AI bias is its name. It induces analogies that have limited adhrence to reality and it generates infinite speculations (some of them causing excessive expectations and fears). Because of this misconception, we proposed we should drop the usage of the term “Artificial Intelligence” and adopt a more appropriate and scoped-limited terminology for these technologies which better describe what these technologies are: Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences. Now we have redefined the name, will we still support the idea that SALAMI will develop some form of consciouness?”
Elizabeth Weil, “You Are Not a Parrot”, in Intelligencer, March 1, 2023
“[LLMs] are great at mimicry and bad at facts. Why? LLMs, like the octopus, have no access to real-world, embodied referents. This makes LLMs beguiling, amoral, and the Platonic ideal of the bullshitter, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt, author of On Bullshit, defined the term. Bullshitters, Frankfurt argued, are worse than liars. They don’t care whether something is true or false. They care only about rhetorical power — if a listener or reader is persuaded.”
“We’ve learned to make “machines that can mindlessly generate text,” Bender told me when we met this winter. “But we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.””
““I feel like there’s too much effort trying to create autonomous machines,” Bender said, “rather than trying to create machines that are useful tools for humans.””
"She then spoke at length about the problems of the computational metaphor, one of the most important metaphors in all of science: the idea that the human brain is a computer, and a computer is a human brain. This notion, she said, quoting Alexis T. Baria and Keith Cross’s 2021 paper, affords “the human mind less complexity than is owed, and the computer more wisdom than is due.””
“No wonder that men who live day in and day out with machines to which they believe themselves to have become slaves begin to believe that men are machines.” Joseph Weizenbaum, who created ELIZA
“There’s a narcissism that reemerges in the AI dream that we are going to prove that everything we thought was distinctively human can actually be accomplished by machines and accomplished better,” Judith Butler
Cory Doctorow, “The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble”, in Medium, March 9, 2023
“Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.”
“Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI.”
“Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines.”
Ben Davis, “Is Crafting ‘Super Prompts’ for A.I. Generators the Art of the Future? Probably Not”, in Artnet News, April 27, 2023
“Given the realities of both creativity (rare) and the digital economy (cutthroat), it seems to me that the latter is going to much more define the impact these tools have on culture.”
“The prompt economy exists to capture whatever value is in an artist’s signature style, and to reprocess it into a generic look—without them... a proper name is a shortcut to reverse engineer all the steps that an artist has put, over hours and months, into crafting a look that feels unique.”
Tate Ryan-Mosley, “How an undercover content moderator polices the metaverse”, in MIT Technology Review, April 28, 2023
“The moderators record everything that happens in the game from the time they join to the time they leave, including conversations between players. Some games give mods administrative privileges to hear everything that players are saying, even if the players themselves have not enabled full access to all other players. This lets them listen in on conversations that players might think are private.”
Erik Salvaggio, “In Defense of Human Senses”, in Cybernetic Forests, April 30, 2023
“if humans saw images the way the AI sees images, we would be dissolving them with stomach acid in order to understand how the paper breaks down so that we could recreate it from a puddle of our own vomit.”
A.V. Marraccini, “Ethereal Presence. NFTs and the theater of risk”, in Artforum, June 16, 2022
“whatever digital form the NFT ultimately takes, be it a JPEG image, moving GIF, audio file, or 3-D model, it consists of at least two media: the para-medium of code that constitutes the smart contract wrapper, and the file “inside” it. Through the para-medium or wrapper of the smart contract, all NFTs become a kind of performance of exchange.”
"the hyper-capitalization of NFTs is in large part responsible for the distaste they have inspired in the contemporary art world, but it is paradoxically what also enables them, combined with the implicit theatricality conferred by the para-medium of the smart contract, to turn back and effectively critique the forms of capital that they embody.”
Jaron Lanier, “There Is No A.I.”, in The New Yorker, April 20, 2023
“many of the people who are pursuing the A.I. dream also worry that it might mean doomsday for mankind. It is widely stated, even by scientists at the very center of today’s efforts, that what A.I. researchers are doing could result in the annihilation of our species, or at least in great harm to humanity, and soon.”
“The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature... Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.”
“f the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration.”
Kyle Chayka, “The Post-Platform Internet”, in Kyle Chayka Industries, April 16, 2023
“The most important thing to keep in mind as we decide which new platforms to invest our time and energy into is that we should be seeking out control and stability in these spaces. We should be able to influence how they function and how we are treated as users. Otherwise we’re doomed to repeat the mistakes of the last decade and end up adrift once more.”
Kyle Chayka, “BuzzFeed, Blue Check Marks, and the End of an Internet Era”, in The New Yorker, April 21, 2023
“we can’t rely on large digital platforms that are motivated by profit above all, and there is no guarantee they will protect or support us or work to deliver the best experiences possible. Instead, they will continue to encourage us to churn out content for free; they will work ruthlessly to capture our attention and then commodify it through every possible avenue. Those huge, public networks are growing riskier, messier, and less enticing by the day; the rocket that drove their explosive growth is faltering.”
“The next decade of the Internet is likely to yield more cloistered digital spaces that seek to correct the ills of Big Social Media. The looming “post-platform” era, as it is already being called, will consist of smaller online communities connecting through group texts, Reddit forums, Discord servers, and e-mail newsletters. It won’t run on public spectacle like the Web we’ve become accustomed to; virality may no longer be the goal. But it may at least offer a less exploitative mode of existing online. In a way, it will resemble an earlier version of the Internet, operating on a tried-and-true principle: friends are more trustworthy than strangers.”
Ryan Broderick, “Breaking Up The Web To Make A Worse One”, in Garbage Day, 19 apr 2023
“It’s hard not to look at both reactions — Washington’s desire to kill the open internet to defeat TikTok and Silicon Valley’s warnings of some sentient god AI — as two sides of the same coin. And that’s especially true because both panic responses are very clearly just a cover for other projects entirely. Banning TikTok is about finally being able to censor what Americans do online. And a large chunk of the folks who signed that big scary open letter asking for a pause on AI development only did so because they need some time to make their own.”
Sarah Friend, “Asset Logic”, in Texte Zur Kunst, Issue No. 127 / September 2022 "Resortization", p. 88.
“Unlike most art forms, you can’t make an NFT without the market.”
“fungibility is an abstraction... The dollar bill has two lives, one as a symbol and one as an object.”
“The NFT is for sale right from its creation – no soft gestation in the studio, no ask-only price list. You don’t have to create a listing. The NFT is visible already, and I can place a bid. Yes, you the creator or owner can hide it, but only after it has been listed in the first place. The market is the default.”
“There is a community of creators and collectors of NFTs who do not know or care about the norms and codes of “contemporary art” – and why should they? Who are you to tell them what the emperor is wearing? It’s not even a conversation. They have their own emperor. His name is Justin Sun. Or maybe punk #-something.”
“Capitalism enjoys it when you resist, because that’s how it finds new things to enclose.” (Rhea Myers)
Boris Eldagsen, “Sony World Photography Awards 2023”, April 18, 2023
”As a medium photography has always been at the forefront: constantly adapting and evolving, it has a singular ability to transform itself and push boundaries. We are interested in photography as an art form, and within the Sony World Photography Awards we have our Creative categories in the Professional and Open Competitions which welcome photographers to experiment and explore the dynamism of the medium. With technological advancements, a wider audience of creators are engaging with lens-based work and we look forward to seeing how this can expand the reach and impact of photography.”
Will Knight, “Some Glimpse AGI in ChatGPT. Others Call It a Mirage”, in Wired, Apr 18, 2023
“We’re getting this tremendous amount of raw intelligence without it necessarily coming with an ego-viewpoint, goals, or a sense of coherent self. That, to me, is just fascinating.” Noah Goodman
Terry Nguyen, “Which face is real? DALL-E art at Gagosian”, in Dirt, Apr 11, 2023
“increased exposure to, and the proliferation of, AI-generated images will have an effect similar to photographic paresthesia. We may not be as shaken by their existence. In fact, we could even grow numb to them. Still, upon recognition, such images may make our skin crawl. Our eyes will alert us to the off-ness of synthetic body parts, like warped fingers or glassy eyes. We’re going to have to learn to look closer. Seeing doesn’t necessarily mean believing.”
Kyle Chayka, “A.I. Pop Culture Is Already Here”, in The New Yorker, April 7, 2023
“execution may have been democratized by generative A.I., but ideas have not. The human is still the originator, editor, and curator of A.I.’s effects.”
Adina Glickstein, “User Error: Partially Automated Shithole Capitalism”, in Spike, April 4, 2023
”these sci-fi-inflected narratives do more to shore up the power of companies like OpenAI – large and notionally beneficent, but totally opaque and pretty much absent of external oversight – than they do to catalyze any meaningful effort toward guiding new technology in a progressive direction. In that sense, the “x-risk” discourse is pretty evidently the perverse fantasy of a bunch of people who previously considered themselves to be secure, i.e., class-privileged and largely white people with well-paid tech jobs, realizing that the ground they stand on is not so stable after all. In other words: classic male insecurity, inflated to the level of existential importance.”
Dejan Grba, “Faux Semblants: A Critical Outlook on the Commercialization of Digital Art”, Digital 2023, 3, 67-80
“the majority of involved artists are focused on navigating, experimenting, and exploiting the NFT landscape for profit, recognition, or institutional support. They largely remain unaware or seem oblivious of the technical problems of the crypto economy, its ideological background, and its ethical, political, and creative consequences, which were identified upon the very introduction of blockchain.“ (p. 71)
“By accelerating trading frequency and market saturation, the crypto regime emphasizes the default ethical dilemma of the creator’s priorities: making art or making money. In a broader perspective, this may be regarded as the primary “value” of NFTs.” (p. 74)
“In general, artists do not solve global-scale problems; when successful, their work can instigate relatively small, individualized, and often transient changes in a complex web of non-mindful existential games. Acknowledging these limitations and cultivating a critical outlook on their creative means and economic instruments are necessary for digital artists to resolve the poetic contradiction of imposing false non-fungibility on inherently fungible digital data, and the ethical and political contradictions of monetizing artworks within the current crypto/blockchain regime.” (pp. 76-77)
Claire Bishop, “INFORMATION OVERLOAD”, in Artforum, April 2023
“There are many reasons to be skeptical of the Ph.D.-in-fine-art boom. One is that it exacerbates hierarchies of economic privilege already endemic to art education. Another is that art, under the pressure of academicization, becomes tame, systematic, and professional. For artist Hito Steyerl, “artistic research” has even become a new discipline, one that normalizes, regulates, and ensures the repetition of protocols.”
“research-based installation art—its techniques of display, its accumulation and spatialization of information, its model of research, its construction of a viewing subject, and its relationship to knowledge and truth—cannot be understood in isolation from contemporaneous developments in digital technology.”
Ben Davis, “How We Ended Up in the Era of ‘Quantitative Aesthetics,’ Where Data Points Dictate Taste”, in Artnet News, March 30, 2023
“Daniel Yankelovich, the sociologist who coined the term “McNamara Fallacy,” actually outlined it as a process, one that could be broken out into four steps of escalating intellectual danger. Here they are, as it is commonly broken down, with his commentary on each:
- Measure whatever can be easily measured. (This is OK as far as it goes.)
- Disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. (This is artificial and misleading.)
- Presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. (This is blindness.)
- Say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. (This is suicide.)
Based on the data I have, I’d say that we as a culture are approaching somewhere between the third and fourth steps.”
Eryk Salvaggio, “Searching for Posthumanist AI”, in Cybernetic Forests, March 26, 2023
“AI is a not a God or a newly discovered fungus with secret competencies. AI is a series of decisions made by people working at companies to sell product. Mythologies like this are dangerous: they ask us to respect a “life form” rather than ask for human accountability in its design and outcomes... AI is not independent from humans or beyond our own agency. It’s not an always-already state of the world. It’s a bunch of human design decisions inscribed into code, with emergent properties. We don’t owe it anything. It is us.”
“AI will reshape the world, and I am not a skeptic in the sense that I think technologies won’t disrupt our lives. I am skeptical that something like today’s automation will bring us any closer to decentering ourselves from the cycle of destruction and extraction that we’re embedded in. If we look to AI as something more than ourselves, we’re going to deceive ourselves into following our instincts toward our own supremacy — at our own peril.”
Caroline Busta, “The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram”, in Document, January 14, 2021
“In an era more profoundly organized by Big Tech than our own elected governments, the new culture to be countered isn’t singular or top-down. It’s rhizomatic, nonbinary, and includes all who live within the Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon digital ecosystem (aka GAFA stack). With digital platforms transforming legacy countercultural activity into profitable, high-engagement content, being countercultural no longer means being counter-hegemonic. What logic could possibly be upended by punks, goths, gabbers, or neo-pagans when the internet, a massively lucrative space of capitalization, profits off the personal expression and political conflict of its users?”
“To be truly countercultural today, in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform, which may come in the form of betraying or divesting from your public online self.”
“It’s as if, having grown up on a fully networked Earth, Gen Z has bypassed counterculture, finding it futile in the face of a hegemonic system that more clearly resembles a Hydra than the monolithic forces that legacy counterculture was rebelling against. Intuiting that any activity directly opposing the system will only make the system stronger, the next generation is instead opting for radical hyperstition: constructing alternative futures that abandon our current infrastructure entirely.”
Yancey Strickler, “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet”, in Medium, May 20, 2019
“Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent... This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest. In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream.”
“Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on... These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.”
“those of us building dark forests risk underestimating how powerful the mainstream channels will continue to be, and how minor our havens are compared to their immensity.”
Caroline Busta and Lil Internet, “Holographic Media”, in Outland, March 31, 2023
“each era of technology has a unique “physics”—a term we use to describe the hard-coded mechanics and incentives of every media platform, whether digital or analog. Users are as bound to these conditions when operating within a given platform as they are to gravity when walking on Earth. Platform physics are the ways in which a medium’s design determines a piece of content’s nature, the content’s “natural motion” through a network, its recipients’ responses, and the various nth order effects of this content being in circulation.”
“Present-day media should be taxonomized not by format or scale or genre but by how well they compose their own media ecosystem—how nimbly an outlet can work across various platforms and protocols, from clearnet to dark forest... The more varied an outlet’s spread of platforms, the less beholden it is to any single one. The less bound it is by any one platform’s physics.”
“Illegibility. Poetry. Speaking even more in diagrams, images, metaphors, collages, neologisms—forms of language that AI (and the Mids) do not yet understand. These are tools for avoiding the Mid-void.”
“Crypto is a scam, too, and everyone knows it. OK, blockchain is not inherently a scam, but the scam potential in recent years was just too big to not scam. Uniquely, crypto created a massive, social media-based scam, with hundreds of thousands of people actively evangelizing ideas they believed only because there was a monetary incentive to do so.”
“To gain agency in today’s media space, you need to overcome the physics of its software. By thinking meta, you can build new protocols, structures that allow truth and trust to emerge. Whether through blockchain tools, new nested internets, or meta-assemblages of various platforms and apps, the future of media will come from experiments taking place at the level of protocol.”
Shumon Basar, “Predicting the Present”, in Outland, March 27, 2023
““lorecore”: “an era, belonging to digital capitalism, characterized by people’s existential need to storify themselves at the very moment global narratives collapse.””
Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin, “Yuval Harari on Threats to Humanity Posed by A.I.”, in The New York Times, March 24, 2023
“In 2022, over 700 top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in a survey about future A.I. risk. Half of those surveyed stated that there was a 10 percent or greater chance of human extinction (or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment) from future A.I. systems. Technology companies building today’s large language models are caught in a race to put all of humanity on that plane.”
“simply by gaining mastery of language, A.I. would have all it needs to contain us in a Matrix-like world of illusions, without shooting anyone or implanting any chips in our brains. If any shooting is necessary, A.I. could make humans pull the trigger, just by telling us the right story.”
“Social media was the first contact between A.I. and humanity, and humanity lost... While very primitive, the A.I. behind social media was sufficient to create a curtain of illusions that increased societal polarization, undermined our mental health and unraveled democracy. Millions of people have confused these illusions with reality.”
Ross Douthat, “The Return of the Magicians”, in The New York Times, March 2, 2023
“in the U.F.O. fascination and the A.I. enthusiasm and the drug-enabled “psychonaut” explorations, we see attempts to link magic to science, or to deploy science to do magic, using telescopes or chemicals or vast computing powers to discover or create what the old magicians tried to conjure — namely, beings that can enlighten us, elevate us, serve us and usher in the Age of Aquarius, the Singularity or both.”
Simon Hattenstone, “Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’”, in The Guardian, March 23, 2023
“From my perspective, the danger isn’t that a new alien entity will speak through our technology and take over and destroy us. To me the danger is that we’ll use our technology to become mutually unintelligible or to become insane if you like, in a way that we aren’t acting with enough understanding and self-interest to survive, and we die through insanity, essentially.”
Jill Lepore, “The Data Delusion”, in The New Yorker, 27/3/2023
“Commerce in the twenty-first century is espionage for profit.”
Taylor Dafoe, “Sculptor Maya Lin Will Release Her First NFT Project, a Generative Art Series Based on the Root Systems of Trees, This Spring”, in Artnet News, March 23, 2023
“There’s no reason a JPEG or an MP4 needs to be on the blockchain, whereas generative code can’t exist in quite the same way anywhere else.” Pace Verso head Ariel Hudes
Chloe Xiang, “People Are Creating Records of Fake Historical Events Using AI”, in Motherboard, March 27, 2023
“as AI innovation occurs at a speed that is hard to keep up with, maintaining and creating adequate safeguards will be challenging. People will still fall for images, especially as they are shared without context. Experts are warning users to be on the lookout for AI-generated images and to be more critical than ever when seeing an image, rather than automatically assuming that it is real.”
Joshua Citarella, “Irony Politics & Gen Z (part 2)”, March 13, 2023
“The cultural nichification of the internet is producing communities so polarized that they have almost no concept of a shared reality or grand narrative.”
“Continued exposure to cringe content might allow us to recapture our lost humanist values. As a culture, we are now attempting to work through irony and arrive again at a place of real beliefs. We now systematically increase our tolerance to cringe so that we can join the political movement without fear or shame. Cringe is the antidote for late capitalist nihilism. That's why the ironic crusaders want to stomp it out.”
“Unlike most other forms of media, memes do not tend to fatigue or oversaturate their viewers. Instead, the more one sees a meme, the more one wants to see that meme more. In this way, memes function as a type of exploit in today's attention economy. Potent memes will get stuck in your head for days. Once the concept takes hold, it becomes difficult to mentally steer out of. Memes nudge our way of thinking. They become a type of augmented reality, overlaying the world and social relationships.”
Joshua Citarella, “Irony Politics & Gen Z (part 1)”, March 9, 2023
“In observing the online content teenagers produce, we can see that Gen Z has learned to expect less than earlier generations. Given that real wages have been stagnant for nearly forty years, life expectancy is declining, and the environment is collapsing, this makes sense. Things are getting worse.”
“irony had never been apolitical. Ironic propaganda functions the same as real propaganda. Ironic voting is just voting.”
“the overwhelming majority of edgy teens on TikTok are not living out the ideology they profess online... Further exploring these users’ pages reveals the abundance of ideological inconsistencies one might expect from contrarian teenagers.”
“Teens are becoming politicized because they have been handed a world in crisis... For young people in a political landscape whose only options are a dead-end future or a return to brutal hierarchies of the past, there is, as right-wing influencers will tell them, seemingly no choice. Reactionary politics flourish most when it is difficult to imagine a better future.”
Tina Rivers Ryan, “Sasha Stiles. Transcending digital dualism through networked poetry”, in Artforum, March 15, 2023
“Humans invented poetry as a data storage system. All the devices that we learn as poetic techniques—rhyme, rhythm, meter, assonance, repetition—aren’t just aesthetic; they have utility in that they helped make spoken language easier to remember before the advent of the written word.” Sasha Stiles
“Artificial intelligence, too, is often regarded as alien or antihuman, when actually it’s hyperhuman—a system built by humans for ingesting, processing, synthesizing, utilizing vast quantities of human information.” Sasha Stiles
Stephen Zacks, “Land of the Free Market”, in Outland, February 24, 2023
“At the moment, the metaverse remains a fairly inchoate project. It isn’t solving any real-world architectural or economic and political problems, but it also hasn’t caused any real-world harm. Yet the hopes expressed for the emerging metaverse—in Liberland and beyond—are reminiscent of the late 1990s, when it was common to believe that nearly free and universal access to information would have a democratizing effect on the world. As some predicted, this potential to level power imbalances and offer more influence to the general public has been offset in large measure by rent-seeking corporations that govern our online attention as a speculative gambit in search of short-term profits. Now, too, venture capitalists are assembling piles of dollars to capture the metaverse market. Rebranded as Meta, Facebook has obviously bet on remaining a social media monopoly by dominating it. What we need is a Wikipedia-style collaborative framework that would govern based on a common interest in being well-informed. More likely, a new player will emerge out of a Wild West of small, highly capitalized startups. But will they be looking for anything other than a return on investment?”
Kyle Chayka, “Bing A.I. and the Dawn of the Post-Search Internet”, in The New Yorker, March 21, 2023
“So much of the current Web was designed around aggregation... What value will those sites have when A.I. can do the aggregation for us? If Google Search is an imperfect book index, telling us where to find the material we need, Bing A.I. is SparkNotes, allowing us to bypass the source material altogether... The paradox of A.I., though, is that it relies on the source material—the vast sea of information that other sites create—to generate its answers. For that reason, it’s easy to imagine a kind of vicious cycle caused by the widespread adoption of tools like Bing A.I. If users don’t have to visit sites directly anymore, then those sites’ business models, based on advertising and subscriptions, will collapse. But if those sites can no longer produce content then A.I. tools won’t have fresh, reliable material to digest and regurgitate.”
Alfred/Dave Steiner, “Bored Apes & Monkey Selfies: Copyright & PFP NFTs”, in SSRN, May 21, 2022
“The promise of transferring copyright in a PFP to its buyer is not without problems. For one thing, there may not be any more copyright in a particular PFP than there is in a monkey selfie. And even if there were a copyright to be transferred, ensuring there’s a signed writing for each transfer is a non-trivial matter. Moreover, PFP creators who purport to transfer copyright to each PFP buyer without drafting the transfer language carefully may be left without rights in the project’s artwork, and may also be exposing themselves to claims from aggrieved PFP buyers.”
Alfred/Dave Steiner, “The Paper It’s Printed On: NFTs, Ownership and Conceptual Art”, in SSRN, December 30, 2021
“You own an NFT when the code says you own it... Of course, because ownership is—at least for the time being—fundamentally a legal concept and not a technological concept, the technological answer may not always conform to the legal answer.”
“assuming Metakovan has the same rights as a typical NFT buyer in the associated Digital Resource (i.e., the right to publicly display the work for non-commercial purposes), what more can he do than any member of the public? Well, he could permit a museum to display the Digital Resource, use it for his Instagram profile picture, or hang it in his metaverse home, but not much more. Those twigs in the bundle of possible ownership rights is what I call Metakovan’s “Private Rights” in Everydays. And those Private Rights, together with the ability to transfer the digital ledger entry, are what Metakovan paid $69 million for.”
“Using paper certificates, Weiner and other conceptual artists succeeded in converting what would otherwise be public goods into valuable private goods. That value, of course, is associated exclusively with the artist’s reputation. And, because these works are intangible but not protectable by copyright or other legal doctrines, that value (and the work’s aura) inheres entirely in the paper certificate. NFTs have performed an analogous transubstantiation for digital art, relocating the aura and value of the work not in a paper certificate but in a digital ledger entry.”
Arun Kakar, “Two Years since the Historic Beeple Sale, What’s Happened to the NFT Market?”, in Artsy, March 10, 2023
“As speculators lose interest and institutions begin supporting these artworks, NFTs are arguably in a healthier, more sustainable place within the art world than they were two years ago.”
Terry Nguyen, “Skeuomorphia”, in Dirt, March 17, 2023
““Skeuomorph” was coined by an English archaeologist in the late 19th century. It has since been used, typically in architecture or archaeology, to refer to objects or buildings with ornamental design properties that are included not for functionality's sake, but due to their past significance: light bulbs shaped like candle flames and decorative handles on sliding doors. The intent behind skeuomorphic design, deliberate or otherwise, is to present the viewer with familiar aesthetic cues. It creates a sense of false realism in graphic design.”
James Bridle, “The stupidity of AI”, in The Guardian, March 16, 2023
“far from being the magical, novel creations of brilliant machines, the outputs of this kind of AI is entirely dependent on the uncredited and unremunerated work of generations of human artists. AI image and text generation is pure primitive accumulation: expropriation of labour from the many for the enrichment and advancement of a few Silicon Valley technology companies and their billionaire owners.”
“AI image generators, in their attempt to understand and replicate the entirety of human visual culture, seem to have recreated our darkest fears as well. Perhaps this is just a sign that these systems are very good indeed at aping human consciousness, all the way down to the horror that lurks in the depths of existence: our fears of filth, death and corruption. And if so, we need to acknowledge that these will be persistent components of the machines we build in our own image. There is no escaping such obsessions and dangers, no moderating or engineering away the reality of the human condition.”
“While claims about AI’s “creativity” might be overblown – there is no true originality in image generation, only very skilled imitation and pastiche – that doesn’t mean it isn’t capable of taking over many common “artistic” tasks long considered the preserve of skilled workers, from illustrators and graphic designers to musicians, videographers and, indeed, writers. This is a huge shift. AI is now engaging with the underlying experience of feeling, emotion and mood, and this will allow it to shape and influence the world at ever deeper and more persuasive levels.”
“ChatGPT is... inherently stupid. It has read most of the internet, and it knows what human language is supposed to sound like, but it has no relation to reality whatsoever. It is dreaming sentences that sound about right, and listening to it talk is frankly about as interesting as listening to someone’s dreams. It is very good at producing what sounds like sense, and best of all at producing cliche and banality, which has composed the majority of its diet, but it remains incapable of relating meaningfully to the world as it actually is.”
“there has never been a time when our ability as individuals to research and critically evaluate knowledge on our own behalf has been more necessary, not least because of the damage that technology companies have already done to the ways in which information is disseminated. To place all of our trust in the dreams of badly programmed machines would be to abandon such critical thinking altogether.”
“It’s hard to think of anything more utterly stupid than artificial intelligence, as it is practised in the current era.”
Orit Halpern, “Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Machines and Markets”, in e - flux Architecture, March 2023
“theories or models, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, “are engines not cameras.”One way to read that statement is that the model does not represent the world but makes it. Models make markets. Models in finance are instruments such as a derivative pricing equations or an algorithm for high-speed trading. There are assumptions built into these technologies about gathering data, comparing prices, betting, selling, and timing bets, but not about whether that information is correct or “true,” or whether the market is mapped or shown in its entirety. These theories are tools, and they let people create markets by arbitraging differences in prices without necessarily knowing everything about the entire market or asset.”
“This infrastructure for our contemporary noisy trading is not natural or inevitable, however. It was produced by the intersection of neo-liberal theory, psychology, and artificial intelligence. If today we swipe and click as a route to imagined wealth, we should ask how we have come to so unthinkingly and unconsciously accept the dictates of finance and technology.”
Matthew Mindrup, “(in)Exactitude and the Digital Twin: Limitations and Possibilities in Re-presenting the Built Environment”, in e - flux Architecture, February 2023
“Digital twins originated in the manufacturing industry as three-dimensional, virtual models of physical objects or systems with the aim of monitoring, controlling, and optimizing their performance. The term “digital twin” is relatively new and is typically ascribed to Michael Grieves who used the term in 2002 as part of his research into product lifecycle management. Yet Grieves himself attributes this term to his colleague at NASA, John Vickers, who employed the term several years later in his 2010 NASA roadmap to describe the ultra-realistic simulations of space capsules that could be designed, modelled, and tested without the cost and risks of actual launches. General Electric, Siemens, and Rolls Royce were also all designing rotors, turbines, and engines with the aid of digital simulations decades before the designation “digital twin” came into use.”
“within a digital twin, the digital model is no longer used for visualizing or guiding the construction of a design proposition. Rather, it acts as an avatar of an existing edifice... Not simply a static digital mock-up of an architectural project, a digital twin brings together data from subsystems and real-time interactions between people, processes, and connected things... What makes the digital twin so appealing is its role as both a virtual copy of a real object and resource of data about the processes actively occurring within its system.”
Kenny Schachter, “Kenny Schachter Pays a Mind-Bending Visit to Beeple’s New High-Tech Art Compound (Getting in Plenty of Trouble Along the Way)”, in Artnet News, March 14, 2023
“There were nearly as many private planes in the local airport as at any given Basel fair.”
Shumon Basar, “The Magic Kingdom. How not to think about Dubai”, in Bidoun, Issue 11: Failure, Summer 2007
“To be a critic today is to regret the exportation of ideas you have failed to confront on your own beat.”
“Dubai operates as one of these Zeitgeist mirror-surfaces for the West... For the neoliberal Right, Dubai is a phantasmagoric setting crafted in the perfect image of unbridled market capitalism (minus the democracy). For the political Left, Dubai may be just a grotesque reflection of the West’s worst endgames, manifest as that evil paradise.”
“Copies and imitations are not abstract ciphers but productions of reality in their own right. (A fake Gucci handbag is still a real handbag.) And with each imitation and recreation, the status of the so-called “original” alters.”
“In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein’s biggest disappointment was that his creation didn’t love him. His biggest regret was setting the precedent in the first place.”
R.H. Lossin, “Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised””, in e-flux Criticism, March 14, 2023
“It is widely accepted that propaganda makes for bad art. But propaganda is not always an Uncle Sam poster. Sometimes it is a towering, spectacular argument for the supremacy of the machine; an exercise in post-industrial American triumphalism, surveillance technology, and repressive deep-state R&D disguised as visually appealing, non-referential images.”
“commissions from museums and commercial galleries will surely continue until the next person with adequate funding comes up with a prettier alibi for testing and refining the empire’s technologies of violence and domination on cultural consumers.”
“the most boring dreams ever”
“tech boosterism at its best”
““Unsupervised” is a program for the surveillance and colonization of collective space and the expropriation and control of forms of human creativity and production by companies that cannot be practically disentangled from the military. This is hard to discern through its fun, candy-colored spectacle, and this makes it, like Abstract Expressionism before it, all the more effective.”
“In 2022 the William S. Paley Foundation... sold a $70 million collection of paintings that had been housed by MoMA in order to fund the museum’s digital initiatives. From a certain perspective, trading Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso in for some NFTs is offensive on its face.”
“It is the cultural work that the spectacular AI is doing to normalize surveillance systems, to turn environmentally devastating computation into something pleasing and even soothing, and to actively participate in the refinement of technologies that can and certainly will be used by the military that is the problem.”
Kyle Chayka, “The Uncanny Failures of A.I.-Generated Hands”, in The New Yorker, March 10, 2023
“The machine’s failure is comforting, in a way. Hands are a symbol of humanity, “a direct correspondence between imagination and execution,” as Patti Smith recently wrote. As long as we are the only ones who understand them, perhaps our computers won’t wholly supplant us. The strange contortions of A.I. hands make me feel a sense of anticipatory nostalgia, for a future when the technology inevitably improves and we will look back on such flaws as a kitschy relic of the “early A.I.” era, the way grainy digital-camera photos are redolent of the two-thousands.”
“Like any struggling art student, A.I. tools will benefit from more training. “There’s a point when the structure and the contour come together for a student,” Soucie said. “That’s usually, like, the second year of college.””
Hana Kiros, “VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence”, in MIT Technology Review, August 6, 2022
“Psychedelics are a class of drugs unified by their ability to alter sensory perception and change the way we process information. Clinical trials incorporating these drugs, which have resurged after being shuttered in the 1970s, have demonstrated that psychedelic-assisted therapy is remarkably good at alleviating symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and depression, which have standard treatments that fail many.”
“Self-transcendent experiences exist on a spectrum. Getting lost in a great book could be considered a weak one; the ego death that high doses of psychedelics can induce is on the opposite end... What marks a self-transcendent experience is the dissolution of our typical self-definition as a discrete individual, separate from other people and the environment.”
“What happens in VR is that sense of completely forgetting about the existence of the external world... So there is definitely similarity there to this sense of experiencing an alternate reality under psychedelics that feels more real than what’s actually out there.” Agnieszka Sekula
“Jacob Aday, a psychiatry researcher at the University of California, San Francisco... thinks VR likely can downregulate the default mode network — a brain network that’s active when our thoughts aren’t directed at a specific task, and which psychedelics can suppress (scientists theorize that this is what causes ego death).”
Gita Jackson, “How a social network falls apart”, in The Verge, March 9, 2023
“In all of these cases — LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter, and even Something Awful — it’s the users who ultimately decide if the sites are viable. We are all just following a horde of posters as they find new places to post, looking for the places where posting feels safest and most plentiful. Twitter is already beginning its sad half-life as advertisers leave the platform and people look for the thing that will replace it, a problem that threatened Musk so much that he briefly banned links to competing social media platforms before reversing course. He knows as well as I do that a site doesn’t have to go offline to be dead.”
Mario Klingemann, “Latent Talent”, in Desk, March 13, 2023
“there are as many different latent spaces as there are models and neural architectures, nevertheless they share properties, behaviours and rules that allow us to apply the knowledge and techniques we learned in one space in any subsequent one we encounter later.”
"The way in which models create a latent space is by trying to arrange everything they learn in a configuration that makes it the most probable and efficient in that, when queried about it later, they will give a most likely correct answer. And the most efficient arrangement to find something again is to put things closer together that share features —like in a library where you do not expect to look for poetry in the natural history shelf.”
"To me the most exciting aspect of working with latent spaces is that we are approaching the point where all kinds of media are being “understood” by these models and, just like in our brains, we will be able to freely move between different media and different modes of expression within a continuous fluid space in a form of synesthesia where a song can be transformed into a visual, that visual can be translated into a poem and the poem might turn into another song. Which means that learning to understand and play latent spaces will become one of the most versatile talents one can acquire.”
Boris Groys, “Alexandre Kojève: Production of the Spirit”, in e-flux Journal, Issue #134, March 2023
“it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man. Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being … Therefore, it is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality” Alexandre Kojève
“Under the conditions of modernity, this spiritualized dimension of the working class manifests itself as art. Art demonstrates that the utilitarian function of every kind of work, including industrial work, is merely accidental. The essential function of work is the production of the ascetic, spiritualized bodies of the working class.”
“A museum consisting exclusively of sheets covered in different uniform colors would be, without a doubt, a museum of paintings: and each of these paintings would be beautiful—and even absolutely beautiful—independent of whether or not it was “pretty,” which is to say, “pleasing” to some and “displeasing” to others, would be beautiful—and even absolutely beautiful.” Alexandre Kojève
Terry Nguyen, “The future of search”, in Dirt, March 3, 2023
“Google results don’t feel authentic, or even written by a real human because the top articles are all in this keyword-loaded language,” said Dmitri Brereton, an engineer who researches search engines and AI. “Social media, especially TikTok, solves that authenticity problem because some experiential things are just better seen. It can’t get more authentic than a video of a person dining at a restaurant.”
“In 2021, TikTok overtook Google’s 15-year reign as the world’s most popular web domain, according to data from CloudShare. Recent data from Morning Consult also found that Gen Z-aged adults are less likely to use Google search to investigate major news events, compared to older users. Instead, more are turning to TikTok.”
“Algorithmic oppression is no accident; it’s fundamental to how the internet operates.”
"This is perhaps another reason why users are compelled to search on TikTok. Their For You page makes them “feel seen” before they input a query. They are more likely to be met with a sympathetic human face, rather than a keyword-laden post. There is comfort in curated, anecdotal advice; it feels like a friend talking from experience. The response is always intimate and almost always interesting, even if it’s not clinical or factual.”
Kate Brown, “Hito Steyerl on Why NFTs and A.I. Image Generators Are Really Just ‘Onboarding Tools’ for Tech Conglomerates”, in Artnet News, March 10, 2023
“[...] the DALL-E aesthetic or certain types of StyleGAN aesthetics, which were very much used—in the case of DALL-E to the point of nausea. I think that’s a style that’s already foreclosed to artists almost because it’s just absolutely overused.”
“In 2021, we had NFTs. In 2022, we have statistical renderings. [These companies] onboard people into new technological environments; with NFTs, people learned how to use crypto wallets, ledgers, and metamasks, and learn all this jargon. With the renderings, we have basically the same phenomenon. They are onboarding tools into these huge cloud infrastructures that companies like Microsoft are now rolling out, backed by these large-scale computing facilities like Azure, for example. Companies try to establish some kind of quasi-monopoly over these services and try to draft people to basically buy into their services or become dependent on them. That’s the stage we’re at. The renderings are basically the sprinklings over the cake of technological dependency.”
“these renderings do not relate to reality. They relate to the totality of crap online. So that’s basically their field of reference, right? Just scrape everything online and that’s your new reality. And that’s the field of reference for these statistical renderings.”
Adam Gopnik, “What Can A.I. Art Teach Us About the Real Thing?”, in The New Yorker, March 1, 2023
“The range and ease of pictorial invention offered by A.I. image generation is startling; the question, though, is whether its arrival is merely recreational or actually revolutionary. Is it like the invention of the electric light bulb or like the coming of the lava lamp?”
“the power of images lies less in their arguments than in their ambiguities. That’s why the images that DALL-E 2 makes are far more interesting than the texts that A.I. chatbots make. To be persuasive, a text demands a point; in contrast, looking at pictures, we can be fascinated by atmospheres and uncertainties.”
Jerry Saltz, “MoMA’s Glorified Lava Lamp Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised is a crowd-pleasing, like-generating mediocrity”, in Vulture, February 22, 2023
“some cross between relaxation exercise and euphoric TED Talk and NSA levels of data mining
“a narcotic pudding”
“pointless museum mediocrity”
“a digital version of the dead-on-arrival Zombie Formalism of the 2010s”
“Unsupervised has the virtue of not disturbing anything inside you; it triggers no mystery. With all due respect to Kuo, it has neither dreams nor hallucinations and takes away art’s otherness. In this hypercontrolled, antiseptic setting, art and doubt maintain separate bedrooms. It’s like looking at a half-million-dollar screensaver.”
“Thanks to social media and the dictates of the market, high art and mass entertainment have never been so intertwined.”
“Anadol wants to create “poetic algorithms for new meditative experiences in the metaverse.” He should work at Facebook.”
“easily digestible digital merriments”
“If AI is to create meaningful art, it will have to provide its own vision and vocabulary, its own sense of space, color, and form. Things Unsupervised lacks.”
Lloyd Wise, “Refik Anadol”, in Artforum, March 2023
“MoMA’s prominent display of an artist such as Anadol, who arrives from a context different from the so-called art world, is surely a shock. Yet perhaps it is precisely those qualities that make the work seem so alien—its inexpressivity, its entanglement with “tech”—that bring it most in line with the historical tradition to which the museum is devoted.”
Jo Lawson-Tancred, “The Prophecies of AARON”, in Outland, November 4, 2022
“These hand-coded programs were not AI in the sense that we understand today, in which a machine is able to learn from vast troves of data thanks to powerful neural networks. Their “expert systems” would instead store the knowledge of a human expert reformatted into a complex set of rules intended to simulate human decision-making... With new iterations of the program he added more sophisticated features, eventually creating a feedback loop that utilized archival memory so that past actions could be recalled to inform future actions according to specific instructions, such as never to cross two lines.”
“If Cohen ended up just automating the stylistic quirks specific to his own practice, this was probably inevitable given the inherent limitations of an “expert system” that can follow instructions but is unable to grasp concepts on its own in the way that AI can today. Teaching a knowledge-based machine to make decisions of any complexity is an arduous task that for Cohen was the work of a lifetime, including the years spent developing his own artistic expertise. Whether convincingly autonomous or not, AARON was ultimately a proof of concept rather than a useful device to either challenge or assist the artist.”
Ben Davis, “We Asked ChatGPT About Art Theory. It Led Us Down a Rabbit Hole So Perplexing We Had to Ask Hal Foster for a Reality Check”, in Artnet News, March 2, 2023
”The glitch seems to be a linear consequence of the fact that so-called Large-Language Models are about predicting what sounds right, based on its huge data sets. As a commenter put it in an already-months-old post about the fake citations problem: “It’s a language model, and not a knowledge model.””
Dorian Batycka, “The Crypto Community Has Gone Nuts for Bitcoin NFTs. Here’s How the New Niche Collectibles Are Building Buzz and Value”, in Artnet News, February 28, 2023
“Like NFTs, which are typically linked to the Ethereum network, Ordinal Inscriptions are digital assets that are inscribed on a satoshi, which is the smallest denomination of Bitcoin. But unlike NFTs, which can be purchased via platforms like OpenSea and Nifty Gateway, Ordinals are bought and sold on Telegram and Discord channels, as marketplaces or even dedicated wallets for Bitcoin Ordinals have yet to take off.”
“Like any niche collectible, including art, the market that develops around Ordinals is only as big as the bags of those willing to purchase it. But Bitcoin, with a current market cap of $449.21 billion, is by far the world’s largest cryptocurrency, far outstripping the $199.70 billion cap of Ethereum. As it is, the momentum of Ordinals has yet to falter...”
Kyle Chayka, “Generative AI and the death of the artist”, in Kyle Chayka Industries, February 26, 2023
“when generative AI tools promise the ability for anyone to make “art,” then the definition of artist is going to radically change. We can’t define an artist as someone who is skilled enough to produce a unique thing on their own — the kind of hard-won skill that takes years or decades to personally develop, on top of a natural gift. AI generators suck up that human talent and creativity (in the form of images, sound, and data), turning it into grist for the mill of technology that entrepreneurs and investors are positioning as the next great innovation.”
"With generative AI, the artist becomes a template, a brand-name, a signifier of some specific style.”
“I don’t care if people enjoy AI-generated culture. It might be a fun solo game to play. Yet I worry about its consequences, the way it suggests we overlook where the data that the tools run on came from and the people who made it. The Surrealists used the word “automatic” to describe art or writing that came directly from the personal subconscious, unmediated. This new kind of automatic culture instead avoids messy, interesting humanity entirely.”
Brian Droitcour, “The Marketplace of Ideas”, in Outland, March 4, 2023
“A dealer showing at Art Dubai Digital for the second consecutive year told me the quality of the audience got worse. In 2022 people came to buy. Now visitors gawk and ask what NFTs are, how digital art is sold, what collectors do with it. Blame it on the bear market, but the structure of Art Dubai Digital seems designed to welcome this type of visitor. About a third of the exhibitors aren’t there to sell.”
Lee Carter, “What I Buy and Why: Digital Collectors Pablo Rodríguez-Fraile and Desiree Casoni on the State of NFT Art and Their Own Tokenized Acquisitions”, in Artnet News, March 6, 2023
“I do not envision ever parting with the collection other than as a donation to a major institution.”
Jussi Parikka, “Operational Images: Between Light and Data”, in e-flux Journal, Issue #133, February 2023
“These changes we tend to associate with the digital turn, but operational images just remind us that moving as well as still images have many histories, not all of which pass through the cinema or belong to art history. Digital images may merely have made these parallel histories more palpably present, but operational images, as Farocki clearly saw, have always been part of the visual culture that surrounds us.” Thomas Elsaesser
Brian L. Frye, “After Copyright: Pwning NFTs in a Clout Economy”, 45 COLUM. J.L. & ARTSb 341, 2022
“some scholars believe copyright is also—or even primarily—justified by authors’ rights to control the use of their works. They’re wrong... Copyright protects commercial speech, because it protects the ability of copyright owners to claim revenue associated with the works they own. In other words, copyright is about profit, and expressive uses of copyrighted works are protected by the fair use doctrine. At least in theory.” (p. 343)
“Demand for some works is high, but for most, it’s nonexistent. In practice, copyright is a lottery, in which a few lucky authors create works everyone loves and hit the jackpot, but the rest get nothing. And because copyright protects all works in the same way and for the same amount of time, it limits access to many unpopular works.” (pp. 344-345)
“technology has eliminated many of the market failures copyright was supposed to solve. Until recently, reproducing, distributing, and exhibiting works was costly. But the Internet made it free to reproduce, distribute, and exhibit digital works. Suddenly, copyright went from a tool for solving market failures to a pure transaction cost. The Internet promises abundance, but copyright ensures artificial scarcity persists.” (p. 345)
“The art market doesn’t value authenticity per se. Rather, authenticity is a proxy. The art market values ownership. More specifically, it values the appearance of ownership. Even more specifically, it values the clout that accompanies ownership. Of course, art collectors value art for its own sake. Who doesn’t? But art isn’t scarce. Vast quantities are available for next to nothing. Only desirable art is scarce. Which is to say, only art with clout is scarce. When you buy a work of art, what you’re really buying is a spot on an artist’s catalogue raisonné. Of course, it’s usually accompanied by a dirty canvas or lumpy rock that signifies ownership. But it’s the spot on the catalogue raisonné that makes the art valuable, not the dirty canvas or the lumpy rock... In other words, the art market was always essentially an NFT market.” (p. 348)
“When you buy an NFT, you don’t buy the right to control the use of a work of authorship. You buy the right to be the owner, and the clout associated with that ownership. And when you sell the work, you sell the clout. Nothing else matters. People can use the work however they like, without affecting your ownership. Or rather, by using the work without your permission, they only prove your ownership. And by talking about the work, they only prove its value. After all, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, and that is doubly true when it comes to clout.” (p. 349)
Sarah Cascone, “‘This Is a New Renaissance:’ Why the Pseudonymous Digital Art Collector Cozomo de’ Medici Just Gave a Major NFT Collection to LACMA”, in Artnet News, February 14, 2023
“I’m more bullish than ever about the space,” de’ Medici said. “This is a new renaissance that we’re experiencing—you can do anything on the digital canvas, which I call the infinite canvas.” The downturn “actually has been a blessing,” he added. “It removed a lot of the speculators. One of the beautiful things to see as the markets went down was that the conversations became richer—because they became even more about the art and less about the money.
Joshua M Brown, “The AI Bubble of 2023”, in The Reformed Broker, February 7, 2023
“When I see a bubble forming I rush in to buy, adding fuel to the fire. That is not irrational.” “I have developed a theory about boom-bust processes, or bubbles, along these lines. Every bubble has two components: an underlying trend that prevails in reality and a misconception relating to that trend. A boom-bust process is set in motion when a trend and a misconception positively reinforce each other. The process is liable to be tested by negative feedback along the way. If the trend is strong enough to survive the test, both the trend and the misconception will be further reinforced. Eventually, market expectations become so far removed from reality that people are forced to recognize that a misconception is involved. A twilight period ensues during which doubts grow, and more people lose faith, but the prevailing trend is sustained by inertia. As Chuck Prince, former head of Citigroup said: we must continue dancing until the music stops. Eventually a point is reached when the trend is reversed; it then becomes self reinforcing in the opposite direction.” George Soros 2009
Joe Stadolnik, “We’ve always been distracted”, in Aeon, 2 February 2023
“Believe me, this is not nourishing the mind with literature, but killing and burying it with the weight of things or, perhaps, tormenting it until, frenzied by so many matters, this mind can no longer taste anything, but stares longingly at everything, like Tantalus thirsting in the midst of water.” (Petrarch)
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practise their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” Thamus in Phaedrus
“New regimes of memory and attention replace the old ones. Eventually they become the old regimes and are replaced, then longed for.”
John Herrman, “Why Bing Is Being Creepy”, in New York Mag, February 16, 2023
“If you understand these chatbots as tools for synthesizing material that already exists into answers that are or appear to be novel, then, yeah, of course they sound familiar! They’re reading the same stuff we are. They’re ingesting our responses to that stuff and the responses to the responses. They’re reading coverage of chatbots and of AI in general — they’re getting Tay’d, in other words, by tweets and Reddit posts and the mainstream media, whose collective texts it has been asked to recompose in the style of chat transcripts that it has also ingested, many of which surely contain the raw materials and patterns necessary to seem manic or depressed or angry or cheerful.”
“the most consistently unsettling thing about AI isn’t what it can do — it’s how it makes us feel.”
Tate Ryan-Mosley, “The fight for “Instagram face””, in MIT Technology Review, August 19, 2022
““Instagram face” is a recognized aesthetic template: ethnically ambiguous and featuring the flawless skin, big eyes, full lips, small nose, and perfectly contoured curves made accessible in large part by filters... Beauty may be subjective, and yet society continues to promote stringent, unattainable ideals that—for women and girls—are disproportionately white, slender, and feminine.”
“Solari thinks technology itself is not to blame in the first place. “It is not the filters that are making this [problem], but society is like this,” she says. “These are the values that society has and sees as beautiful. And that’s why it goes viral.” Creators observe a consistent and shockingly high demand for deformation beauty filters that fit a particular aesthetic.”
Will Douglas Heaven, “ChatGPT is everywhere. Here’s where it came from”, in MIT Technology Review, February 8, 2023
“ChatGPT was trained using reinforcement learning on feedback from human testers who scored its performance as a fluid, accurate, and inoffensive interlocutor. In effect, OpenAI trained GPT-3 to master the game of conversation and invited everyone to come and play. Millions of us have been playing ever since.”
Isaiah Poritz, “Hermès Defeats MetaBirkins in the First NFT Trademark Trial”, in Bloomberg Law, February 8, 2023
“The jury determined that the NFTs are more akin to consumer products subject to strict trademark laws that protect brands from copycats and those looking to capitalize on their goodwill.”
Ted Chiang, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”, in The New Yorker, February 9, 2023
“This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large-language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. When we think about them this way, such hallucinations are anything but surprising; if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after ninety-nine per cent of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.”
“Is it possible that, in areas outside addition and subtraction, statistical regularities in text actually do correspond to genuine knowledge of the real world?”
Henry Mance, “Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Privacy has been extinguished. It is now a zombie’”, in Financial Times, January 30 2023
“It is possible to have surveillance capitalism, and it is possible to have a democracy. It is not possible to have both.”
“Today tech companies “are becoming much more reluctant to patent their discoveries, because they don’t want the public to know exactly what they’re doing. They’re no longer in most cases making their own data available to researchers.” ... One of the huge problems that we have is that most of the information that comes out of the companies is intentionally designed to be misleading. Gaslighting is a rhetorical art form that is genuinely practised by these companies.”
“Our political stability, our ability to know what’s true and what false, our health and to some degree our sanity, is challenged on a daily basis depending on which decisions Mr Musk decides to take. I regard this as fundamentally intolerable . . . These spaces cannot exist solely under corporate control . . . We’re two decades into the digital era but we have never, as democracies, taken stock of the meaning of these technologies.”
“This is a world in which privacy has been extinguished. Privacy is now a zombie category. None of us have privacy, even as we thought about it in the year 2000.”
Cory Doctorow, “Tiktok's enshittification”, in Pluralistic, 21 Jan 2023
“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”
Kevin Buist, “Curation under Constraint”, in Outland, February 23, 2022
“As web3 explores how curators can mediate and contextualize this new boom of digital art, the NFT world runs the risk of repeating and accelerating a grave mistake of Web 2.0: emptying the word “curate” of all its meaning, destroying its associations with care, research, and collaboration; and rendering it a near-mindless activity of rapid image association and exchange.”
“The best exhibitions aren’t containers for artwork. They’re radical propositions that force us to confront art in light of new contexts and possibilities. Curating involves pushing against the very structures that support exhibitions and setting artworks on a collision course with the material, social, and political realities of the world.”
Brian Droitcour (ed), “Brian L. Frye & Primavera de Filippi”, in Outland, April 5, 2022
“With regards to NFTs... it is unclear which rights, if any, are being licensed when someone acquires an NFT. When the copyright is explicitly being licensed, it’s usually done via a centralized platform that defines the rights in their own terms of service. These rights are not embedded in the token and therefore can be changed at any time. So there is a lot of legal uncertainty as well, but for very different reasons, and the NFT issue is easier to solve. It’s just a matter of crafting proper techno-legal solutions that enable the licensing of rights to follow the transfer of the tokens.” (De Filippi)
“Copyright is not only about rewarding artists, it’s also about providing control over how your work can be used, displayed, or exploited commercially and non-commercially.” (De Filippi)
Brian L. Frye, “Clout and Control”, in Outland, December 23, 2021
“What if NFTs mean we don’t need copyright anymore? Ever since the printing press enabled mechanical reproduction, “owning” an authored work has meant using copyright to control it. Copyright makes works artificially scarce, and scarcity creates economic value. But NFTs created a new kind of digital scarcity that relies on clout, rather than control. Collectors value NFTs because they represent the prestige of ownership, copyright be damned.”
“Anyone who creates an image owns the copyright for the image they created. But NFTs have nothing to do with copyright. When you own an NFT, you own a unique copy of an intangible work. But you don’t own its copyright. You own the right to sell it.”
“Anyone who creates an image owns the copyright for the image they created. But NFTs have nothing to do with copyright. When you own an NFT, you own a unique copy of an intangible work. But you don’t own its copyright. You own the right to sell it.”
“The NFT market turns copyright on its head by reconceptualizing all authors as artists. If authors can sell their works, rather than copies of their works, maybe copyright just doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone assumes the art market is unusual. But copyright is just a side effect of mechanical reproduction. Perhaps NFTs are a back-to-the-future technology that will enable all authors to take advantage of art world economics.”
“The NFT market is booming because people want to own the kind of nothing NFTs represent. The art market has always been a market in nothing—a trade in ineffable clout. The appearance of new markets in nothing should come as no surprise.”
Brian Frye, “NFTs Are Securities and It’s Great”, in Coindesk, Dec 28, 2022
“The Supreme Court’s well-known Howey test states that an investment is a security the SEC can regulate if it is an investment of money in a common enterprise with the expectation of profit based on the efforts of others. Every investment in artwork or NFTs is an investment in an artist’s career, with the expectation (or at least hope) of profit, by virtue of the artist becoming famous. It couldn’t be more obvious that art and NFT collectors are buying a security interest in an artist’s career.”
“What if Kim Kardashian could sell NFTs effectively representing a fractional interest in her clout? People who think she will be even more famous in the future could speculate on just how famous she will become and people who think she is a flash in the pan could short her clout. The point is, it would give celebrities – even authors – access to the capital markets they’ve never had before. That could transform the market for knowledge goods, by enabling authors to sell investments in their project, rather than expensive copies.”
Rhea Nayyar, “What Does TikTok’s “Corecore” Have to Do With Dada?”, in Hyperallergic, January 26, 2023
“Corecore TikToks layer or flicker between clips from viral videos of people admitting loneliness or depression, nihilistic dialogue scenes from popular films or TV shows, deep-fried memes, and other staples of “chronically online” web culture in a curated supercut that hits the nail on the head in terms of our collective feeling of hopelessness and anxiety as we hurtle through continuously “unprecedented times.””
“Corecore utilizes the moving image and capitalizes on the infinite capacity of TikTok’s algorithmic curation to evoke similar feelings of existential dread from those who come across it. You’ll see flashes of viral ASMR content, fast fashion hauls, dating or weight loss advice, influencer drama, and other TikTok trends throughout Corecore videos as a form of metacommentary on how the app itself is a large contributor to the generalized anxiety and addictive overstimulation we’re experiencing in the digital age.”
John Herrman, “The AI Magic Show”, in Intelligencer, January 18, 2023
“The companies making these tools could describe how they were designed, how they were trained, and on what data. But they couldn’t reveal exactly how an image generator got from the words purple dog to a specific image of a large mauve Labrador, not because they didn’t want to but because it wasn’t possible — their models were black boxes by design. They were creating machines that they didn’t fully understand, and we were playing with them. These models were inventing their own languages. Maybe they were haunted.”
Ethan Mollick, “The practical guide to using AI to do stuff”, in One Useful Thing, January 24, 2023
“AI lies continuously and well. Every fact or piece of information it tells you may be incorrect."
“Despite of (or in fact, because of) all its constraints and weirdness, AI is perfect for idea generation. You often need to have a lot of ideas to have good ideas. Not everyone is good at generating lots of ideas, but AI is very good at volume. Will all these ideas be good or even sane? Of course not. But they can spark further thinking on your part.”
Joshua Citarella, “There is No Alternative”, Jan 26, 2023
“Many of these projected futures contain counter-intuitive terms, like “Fully Automated Luxury Ruralism” or “Promethean Christian Socialist Reset”. While these absurd labels are certainly part of the humor, I also began to think of these pairings as a form of permutation and potentially as a way of hedging risk. If you live in uncertain times, you probably want to prepare yourself for the worst. The more terms jammed together, the greater the chance that some part of it might just be right. Perhaps the early e-deologies were not as silly as they first appeared. Maybe they were a rough attempt to calculate the vast spread of possibilities for what comes after the “end of history”.”
Joshua Citarella, “From Techno-Libertarianism to Eco-Fascism”, January 24, 2023 (2019)
“For many of us who grew up online – as nerds, gamers, or introverted creatives – the internet was a place you could go to “be a loser with your friends”. Before Web 2.0, fandoms and message boards were something of a safe space for the IRL socially awkward. But today’s internet is overrun by social media, set to the ever-accelerating pace of technocapitalism.”
Kieran Press-Reynolds, “This is corecore (we’re not kidding)”, in No Bells, November 29, 2022
“Whether intentionally or by accident, corecore is an anti-trend: it doesn’t ask anything of you; it’s simply a montage of random vibes.”
“Erfani described the subgenre’s unspoken manifesto succinctly as “essentially the abstract concept of taking random videos, and editing them together to the point that it makes sense to the viewer. Or at least have the viewer interpret it in their own way.” It’s arguably transcendental, the way these videos stitch cultural detritus and weirdo media into 15-second wonder-blasts. An oasis of unthinking vibes amid the hellscape of dreary stimuli.”
Ben Davis, “An Extremely Intelligent Lava Lamp: Refik Anadol’s A.I. Art Extravaganza at MoMA Is Fun, Just Don’t Think About It Too Hard”, in Artnet News, January 23, 2023
“It’s striking to see MoMA tacitly let a new high-tech formalism through the door, one even flatter and less historical than Barr’s—as if the curators were so excited by the wonders of A.I. that they didn’t notice. What the endorsement of “Unsupervised” as an alternative-art-history simulator insinuates, for its audience, is that art history is just a bunch of random visual tics to be permuted, rather than an archive of symbol-making practices with social meanings.”
“At most, the installation conveys a generalized awe at the machine’s superhuman capacity of visual analysis.”
“It is because Anadol has created such a purely decorative, cheerleader-ish style of A.I. art... that he received so much support along the way from the tech giants. Indeed, his positivity is probably an unstated condition of that support.”
“Sadly, the melting of commercial and non-commercial borders strikes me as more prophetic of “what might be to come” in art than any of the images summoned up by the machine in the gallery.”
Ryan Broderick, “Dumb and shameful until it's not”, in Garbage Day, January 23, 2023
“This stuff is already moving very fast, but the fact it’s becoming open source just as quickly, to me, means we’re not going to wake up one day and find out it all just disappeared... I don’t think we’re going to see another large-scale attempt at taking cryptocurrency mainstream for quite a while. The use case for A.I., however, is much more clear. Which is why I find it as exciting, as I do dangerous.”
Joshua Citarella , “Raw eggs, pink pills, and embodied identity: Online communities create their own proof in a vacuum of truth”, in Document, December 19, 2022
“In the 2010s, society ceded its main communication network to an advertising platform. The incentives of this online economy have driven our cultural and political discourse ever since. This cacophonous horizontality has given rise to many new forms of snake oil salesmen.”
“Today’s cultural and political chaos is no longer the result of corrupt institutions, but of a lack of trustworthy institutions.”
“The task of creatives and intellectuals today should be to collect these uncommon points of alignment. We must weave these narrative threads into a newly coherent social fabric. In this final chapter of postmodernism, we will find new ways to reconstitute consensus reality. We must build new truth-seeking institutions for a society that has lost its way.”
Victoria Powell, “AI Art: Will It Make Artists Obsolete?”, in The Gallery Companion, January 4, 2023
“I can see how this technology as it gets more advanced might pose a problem for the livelihoods of illustrators, graphic designers, digital animators and photographers producing commercial work... But there’s a difference between commercial creative output and fine art. Statements that suggest the possibility of artist obsolescence lack real understanding of the role of artists in our world.”
Ruby Justice Thelot, “On Furries and the Limits of Trustlessness”, in Friends with Benefits, January 12, 2023
“Day after day, we encounter the limits of trustlessness in a world that is still anchored by interpersonal relationships. Trustless systems don’t just create an environment where we have little recourse if something goes wrong; they can lead to increasingly radical behaviors focused less on mending conflict and fostering long-term community growth than on forking protocols and communities over disagreements.”
Brian L. Frye, “NFTs & the New Creative Economy”, in Bankless, January 12, 2023
“the art market is a market for ledger entries. When you buy an artwork, you’re really buying an entry on an artist’s catalogue raisonné, the list of works attributed to that artist. Of course, you typically get a physical token that symbolizes your ownership of the ledger entry, usually a dirty piece of cloth or a lumpy rock. But the physical token is worthless, without the ledger entry.”
“Copyright was a great policy tool in a world beset by scarcity. But it sucks, in a world of abundance.”
Leo Kim, “AI is the new Animal”, in Dirt, January 12, 2023
“what we need is a more nuanced way to relate to these other minds—to foster a relationship with these AIs grounded in the limits of their inhumanity and their unknowability. Luckily, this isn’t the first time that human technics have sculpted an intelligent, alien mind independent from our own. Today, we simply know these creatures as our dogs, cats, and furry friends: what Donna Haraway calls our “companion species.” These creatures not only instruct us on how we might live alongside thinking beings that possess a mind radically different from our own, but also reveal just how porous the lines between technology, humans, and animals can be.”
Dan Hicks, “How NFTs and 3D Printing Are Changing Restitution”, in Frieze, January 03, 2023
“a copy is never merely a copy, and the act of reproduction can affect the original as much as the simulacrum. Casts and copies can change an artwork, its authenticity, its aura, its meaning but also its coherence.”
“these new mimetic technologies are far from neutral. And they may even risk doing far more damage than older techniques of making plaster casts or taking photographs or making museum documentation. The ethics of restitution begins with the admission that a case-by-case approach is essential...“ Making copies is no silver bullet for restitution. Sometimes, perhaps, the museum case should be left empty – as a space for reflection and remembrance as well as return.”>
Mathew Dryhurst, “AI Art and the Problem of Consent”, in ArtReview, 10 January 2023
“I do not believe that artists are in too much danger of being replaced by AI. Artistic practices are so much more complex than a style that can be mimicked. What we value of art is more social than we often acknowledge... Great art is socially determined, and is often found when and where that happens. There are great AI artists just as there are great painters, which will become clear as more become fluent with the field and its alien possibilities.”
“A human piecing together a new work from snippets of older works is fundamentally distinct from the automated ability to spawn infinite works in the style or likeness of someone from training data. As such, it demands new ideological frameworks of consent and attribution. The polar ideologies of free culture or rigid IP protectionism of the last century feel insufficient for tackling an issue that promises to mutate into a long culture war.”
Benj Edwards, “AI image generation tech can now create life-wrecking deepfakes with ease”, in ArsTechnica, 12.09.2022
“As awareness grows, our culture may eventually absorb and mitigate these issues. We may accept this kind of manipulation as a new form of media reality that everyone must be aware of. The provenance of each photo we see will become that much more important; much like today, we will need to completely trust who is sharing the photos to believe any of them. But during a transition period before everyone is aware of this technology, synthesized fakes might cause a measure of chaos. While it's tempting to think that our sense of media reality—even if currently misplaced—may suffer a fatal blow at the hands of synthesized photography, many people already know to be skeptical of photos that could be manipulated or taken out of context. Still, we tend to believe evidence when it supports what we want to believe. In that sense, nothing has changed but the scale and speed at which the fakes can take place.”
Min Chen, “In an Ironic Twist, an Illustrator Was Banned From a Reddit Forum for Posting Art That Looked Too Much Like an A.I.-Generated Image”, in Artnet News, January 10, 2023
“Even if you did ‘paint’ it yourself, it’s so obviously an A.I.-prompted design that it doesn’t matter.” “If you really are a ‘serious’ artist,” the message went on, “then you need to find a different style because A) no one is going to believe you when you say it’s not A.I., and B) the A.I. can do better in seconds what might take you hours.”
Elaine Velie, “What’s in Store for NFTs in 2023?”, in Hyperallergic, January 3, 2023
“My pessimist view is that the days of NFTs being a chance for any outsider to make it big are long over. You need a connection to an established institution again, just like before... There was a real but temporary moment of decentralization, but it was just part of a longer process of recentralization.” Kyle McDonald
“I think that it’s important to view the NFT for what it is — which is just a platform for speculation... The goal is for people to be able to make money off that, and people don’t care about what the actual image is.” Molly White
Eric Glen Weyl, Puja Ohlhaver, and Vitalik Buterin, “Decentralized Society: Finding Web3's Soul”, in SSRN, May 10, 2022
“the economic value finance trades on is generated by humans and their relationships. Because web3 lacks primitives to represent such social identity, it has become fundamentally dependent on the very centralized web2 structures it aims to transcend, replicating their limitations.”
“Web3 aspires to transform societies broadly, rather than merely financial systems. Yet today’s social fabric — families, churches, teams, companies, civil society, celebrity, democracy — is meaningless in virtual worlds (often called the “metaverse”) without primitives representing human souls and the broader relationships they support. If web3 eschews persistent identities, their patterns of trust and cooperation, and their composable rights and permissions, we see, respectively, sybil attacks, collusion, and a limited economic realm of wholly transferable private property—all of which trends towards hyper-financialization.”
Geert Lovink, Extinction Internet. Our Inconvenient Truth Moment, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2022
“Now, the possibility of internet extinction is raised. This is our Inconvenient Truth moment. Not only have infinite possibilities imploded into platform realism, but we also face the existentially confronting horizon of finitude. Not of TCP-IP or packet switching. Extinction Internet marks the end of an epoch of collective imagination that in many ways demonstrated how alternative vertical and horizontal technological arrangements were possible. Not one stack but many plateaux.”
“Extinction Internet is the end of an era of possibilities and speculations, when adaptation is no longer an option. The mourning of the disappearance of the becoming internet started earlier; when the platform closed off the collective imagination. It feels like another internet is no longer possible. The user-as-programmer is condemned to live on as a zombie, mindlessly swiping and scrolling, no longer aware of their own activity. While in the recent past I have described this behaviour as subliminal or subconscious, in the next phase the medium is brain-dead. While a profoundly soporific state is rapidly emerging, our habitual information gestures continue to function in an automated style.”
“what’s really at stake here is a collapse of the collective imagination of a technology that is playing such a pivotal role in the everyday life of billions, one that nonetheless can be shaped, steered, designed, bent towards unofficial purposes. The closing of the possibility of change has been going on for a decade or more, replaced by smooth user interfaces and cat videos.”
Chus Martínez, “Towards Life”, in Art Agenda, July 8, 2022
“The pandemic has revealed that disciplines based exclusively on fact and scientific data are coming, in their modern sense, to an end. Millions of people decided against the vaccine, for example, showing that trust cannot rely only on scientific proofs. Anxiety, and all the paranoias that grow in a hyper-sensitized social body, produces fantasies. And the only way to counteract them is to channel them through other fantasies. I believe it is completely possible to imagine a technology and a science that is diverse and also attentive to how other species see and perceive. Imagine machines that could menstruate, or with sensorial devices mimicking the organs of animals rather than humans.”
“I imagine art as an imaginative, evolutive substance capable of observing both itself and life. An evolution that made art acquire morphic traits so that it can take, ahead of time, the form our time requires. Like stem cells, art is able to join the organ that the body currently needs. As in a bird flock, art is the intelligence that allows us to pirouette together in the skies, even if we can’t perform such moves on our own. Art activates the collective intelligence present in complex organizational systems. It’s difficult to reduce this to exhibition-making or the market.”
“the big international exhibitions are still conceived under the orders of presentation or the nostalgias of process-experiencing, rather than with the desire to juxtapose very different worlds. I imagine an exhibition of machines with turtle-eye cameras and deep-learning devices talking to whales, I imagine an exhibition reimaging what it means to be social, I imagine an exhibition proposing fantasies of political organizations that grant rights and embody the values of co-creation. I imagine children.”
Guy Debord, “A Sick Planet”, 1971. In e-flux Notes, November 28, 2022
“the problem of the degeneration of the totality of the natural and human environment has already ceased to present itself in terms of a loss of quality, be it aesthetic or of any other kind; the problem has now become the more fundamental one of whether a world that pursues such a course can preserve its material existence.”
“This science can do no more than walk hand in hand with the world that has produced it—and that holds it fast—down the path of destruction; yet it is obliged to do so with eyes open. It thus epitomizes—almost to the point of caricature—the uselessness of knowledge in its unapplied form.”
“A society that is ever more sick, but ever more powerful, has recreated the world—everywhere and in concrete form—as the environment and backdrop of its sickness: it has created a sick planet.”
“Alienated industrial production makes the rain. Revolution makes the sunshine.”
Joost Vervoort, “Imagination Infrastructuring for Real and Virtual Worlds”, in e-flux Architecture, October 2022
“Using the power of games to help publics be more imaginative in real life settings holds far more potential, especially if there can be active, imaginative engagement with people’s identities, values and desires for change.”
Cade Diehm, “The Para-Real: A Manifesto”, in New Design Congress, 9 December 2022
“Between the digital realm and our physical world is a third space — hybrid, ephemeral and poorly understood. You may have encountered it recently: an uncanny or unreal sense of almost touching something in a VR scene, an impossible fatigue during a Zoom call that leaves you floating like a balloon full of lead, or an eerie unease at the accuracy of a targeted advertisement. For decades, this in-between space has influenced the digitised society unseen. We call it the Para-Real, an emotional and transformative state that emerges when the electronic and the real collide, and — just for a moment — creates a space that can only exist at the exact second where platforms and atoms operate in absolute parallel. The para-real occurs inside this time-space, a form of perception and interface de-realisation whose boundaries can no longer be perceived—and whose affects are longer separated. The para-real is at once conditioned by computational forces, yet also immune to the parasitic intrusion of practices of extraction. The para-real is thus a paradoxical state of subsistence within the fissures of the digital and the analogue. The para-real is what occurs before the cybernetic digestion.”
Will Douglas Heaven, “Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone?”, in MIT Technology Review, December 16, 2022
“Most text-to-image models today are trained on a large data set called LAION, which contains billions of pairings of text and images scraped from the internet. This means that the images you get from a text-to-image model are a distillation of the world as it’s represented online, distorted by prejudice (and pornography).”
“People say it’s not very good at this thing now, and of course it isn’t,” says Cook. “But a hundred million dollars later, it could well be.”
Samantha Ayson, “On art as a playground of ideas”, in The Creative Independent, December 16, 2022
“identity isn’t a late or disposable addition to crypto—a cryptographic key is an identity for a particular value of “identity.” And to borrow Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of liberty, crypto gives us both negative freedom (freedom from control through privacy and commitment) and positive freedom (freedom to experiment in a new space and to pay for those experiments). Those freedoms support self-realization which includes identity play, identity discovery, and identity exploration.” (Rhea Myers)
Joshua Citarella, “Politigram & the Post-left”, September 2018.
“The irony of being an anti-tech radical on the internet is not lost on these teens. Everyone in today’s society lives in constant contradiction of their ideals. In these young corners of the internet everything is simultaneously ironic and genuine.”
“What begins as a casual engagement with funny memes can rapidly metastasize.”
Zachary Small, “The Innovators: Curator Tina Rivers Ryan on Getting Over Her NFT Skepticism and What’s Next for Blockchain Art”, in Artnet News, December 22, 2022
”NFTs have not fully solved problems in the art world, though they can represent a step in the right direction. But issues like a lack of transparency, faulty provenance records, art flipping, and artist royalties need more work. I hope the outcome of these conversations will be that people who have been empowered and enfranchised by NFTs will realize the importance of these points.“
Zachary Small, “The Innovators: Art Blocks CEO Erick Calderon on Crypto Speculation, the Bear Market, and Building His Kids’ Future on the Blockchain”, in Artnet News, December 19, 2022
“The whole reason that NFTs gained traction in the art world and beyond was because creators were getting the opportunity to participate in their own success. Preventing that relationship from growing would be antithetical to the ecosystem we have created.”
John Cassidy, “Washington Needs a Crypto Rethink”, in The New Yorker, 20/12/2022
“if this year’s crises in the crypto sector have indicated anything, it’s that much of what passes for crypto “innovation” involves encouraging people to speculate, often with borrowed money, on digital assets that have little or no intrinsic worth and can swing wildly in market value.”
Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, “Excavating AI. The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets”, The AI Now Institute, NYU, September 19, 2019
“What sorts of politics are at work when pictures are paired with labels, and what are the implications when they are used to train technical systems? [...] the automated interpretation of images is an inherently social and political project, rather than a purely technical one. Understanding the politics within AI systems matters more than ever, as they are quickly moving into the architecture of social institutions: deciding whom to interview for a job, which students are paying attention in class, which suspects to arrest, and much else.”
“While the efforts of companies to build more diverse training sets is often put in the language of increasing “fairness” and “mitigating bias, ” clearly there are strong business imperatives to produce tools that will work more effectively across wider markets.”
“The training sets of labeled images that are ubiquitous in contemporary computer vision and AI are built on a foundation of unsubstantiated and unstable epistemological and metaphysical assumptions about the nature of images, labels, categorization, and representation. Furthermore, those epistemological and metaphysical assumptions hark back to historical approaches where people were visually assessed and classified as a tool of oppression and race science. Datasets aren’t simply raw materials to feed algorithms, but are political interventions. As such, much of the discussion around “bias” in AI systems misses the mark: there is no “neutral,” “natural,” or “apolitical” vantage point that training data can be built upon. There is no easy technical “fix” by shifting demographics, deleting offensive terms, or seeking equal representation by skin tone. The whole endeavor of collecting images, categorizing them, and labeling them is itself a form of politics, filled with questions about who gets to decide what images mean and what kinds of social and political work those representations perform.”
Maya Ganesh, “Between metaphor and meaning: AI and being human”, in Interactions, XXIX.5 September - October 2022, Page: 58
“Metaphors are figures of speech that help to convey experiences or observations that are difficult to describe because they may be unfamiliar, new, emergent, or complex. Metaphors slip into common parlance, easily making us forget that they are indeed just metaphors; they can be misleading, and they can also work as self-fulfilling prophecies because they fully occupy an unfamiliar phenomenon even after it becomes less so. This is neither unequivocally good nor bad, but requires attention because language matters, and is political because it structures and brings worlds into being.”
“Human relations with other humans, and nonhumans like animals, the planet, and machines, are largely incomputable, not because they are mysterious, but because they are complex, affective, fragmentary, and difficult to frame as computationally legible formulations. To live with such illegibility is what has always made human life a profound and poetic struggle.”
Philipp Schmitt, "Introduction to ‘Blueprints for Intelligence’”, 2021.
“What is at stake with present-day AI is not a robot invasion, but which concepts of intelligence get prioritized and how they relate to and frame the world at large. Looking at the history of artificial neural networks through its diagrams lets us trace key tendencies in the technology’s evolution. Unconcerned with what a diagram might tell a researcher, this book asks what it says about them. It is an archaeological speculation of sorts, drawing connections between the visual representations of neural networks and AI researchers’ conception of cognition.”
“It seems we lack the vocabulary and imagery to think and talk about intelligence without either invoking the animate or the spiritual.”
Jussi Parikka, “Preface: Operational Images, All the Way Down”, in Jussi Parikka, Operational Images, University of Minnesota Press 2022.
“the history of photography, technical images, and visual media could be told in the same key: instruments built upon instruments, upon infrastructures, upon practices, upon techniques, upon further instruments and infrastructures, and so on. Operations built on operations that include elements that are material and semiotic, forms of knowing, and forms of mattering.”