Artificial Imitation or Absolute Illustration?

Central Image: Prompt: “Guggenheim Museum Bilbao skyscraper, dramatic lighting, mist, wideshot, people walking in foreground, unreal engine 5 render, 4k” | designoutsider.com

The critique of reason is turning into the critique of media

Bernard Siegert

The year 2022 was the year when the long-awaited AI technology (Artificial Intelligence) managed to yield results. Not that it hadn’t been doing that for the past decade, occupying the attention of even general-audience media, but it seems that the past year was a turning point and now the evidence to back it up seems to have appeared.

The Terminator | kinorotterdam.nl

So, for example, in an attempt to ethically support chatbot LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) or to set off a strategic advertising campaign, Google engineer Blake Lemoine publicly claimed that Google’s system for building chatbots based on its most advanced large language models had become sentient, a feature that is very crucial for machines such as that one. Yet another mark of the development of AI technology is Chat GPT by Open AI. When asked a question, Chat GPT goes through the so-called “Plenty” of the mediascapes of our modern cyber archives and answers, like a modern-day Oracle of Delphi but with less ambiguous disposition and results. 

Mattias del Campo, Sanda Manninger | archdaily.com

Respectively, in the field of design and representational arts in general, Midjourney and DALL-E 2 emerged, which also go through the infinite references on the internet and come up with results in the form of an image. There, for example, one can create the dreamlike worlds of Dali in Frida Kahlo’s style or the Simpsons’ house in Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s pen or any other combination one may come up with in the text given to the machine. Creators are now free to actualise all of their fantasies through the push of a button.

The wider world of “The Milkmiad” | artweek.com

As one may suspect, many possibilities are unlocked this way but also many concerns arise with the most crucial being the eradication of creative professions since the machine will take on their labour. These speculations, which in their extreme form invoke fear and bring Sarah O’Connor to mind, seem to overestimate artificial intelligence and underestimate human intelligence. On one hand, the combinations in the text prompt still require human creativity and cunning. On the other hand, history confirms that similar concerns arose with the industrial revolution but for each occupation that ceased to exist, four others appeared in its place. Therefore, one can conclude that AI will not put creators out of a job so easily. Whether the new positions will be of the same quality, it is difficult to speculate as of now.

Rasa Navasaityte/MidjourneyAI | archpaper.com

So, the question really concerns the medium itself and whether it can be more creative than simply copying and pasting existing techniques and styles. If the former is true, we can stay optimistic that the members of the human race who deal with art and design, but also the ones who aren’t trained in transferring their ideas from their minds to the two dimensions, will find a proper way to manage this tool and even achieve great results with it. However, if the second case is true the possible ramifications are many. The allure of the tool's convenience may seduce us and we could lose ourselves in the available pool of references, images and cultural sediments and reproduce them ad infinitum. One can easily imagine that whichever team controls the archival data structures and the volume of the cultural production of this technology from the beginning will be the team that will be able to rapidly enlarge itself. We can call it soft propaganda of the Global North to reach a better understanding. What is most likely to be found in internet archives? Pictures of Tom Cruz or pictures of Singapore’s most famous actor?

Matthew Maganga, Midjourney AI | archdaily.com

I believe that these thoughts, while they are valid and require further analysis, belong to a technophobic tendency that emerges along with each new creative medium like typography or the cinema. For me, it brings to mind the birth or acceleration of the intellectual establishment of a cultural technique, based on copying as laid out by Bernhard Siegert. An act, that is, which takes place horizontally in between cultures, an act that is done, much like writing, music and counting. Humans had been writing long before the invention of the concept of writing or alphabets; thousands of years went by until images and sculptures introduced the concept of representation. We have been copying continuously and daily even before the middle ages but the idea of replicating with the help of a machine to produce a particular cultural product is new to us. Perhaps it is time to properly repeat ourselves.