While some may argue that generated text and images will save time
and money for businesses, a data ecological view immediately
recognizes a major problem: AI feeds into AI. To rephrase it:
statistical computing feeds into statistical computing. In using
these models and publishing the results online we are beginning to
create a loop of prompts and results, with the results being fed
into the next iteration of the cultural snapshots. That’s why I
call the early cultural snapshots still uncontaminated, and I
expect the next iterations of cultural snapshots will be
contaminated.
Francis, thanks for your work, it's always totally interesting.
Your argumentation is impeccable and one can easily see how positive feedback loops will form around elements of AI-generated (or perhaps "recombined") images. I agree, this will become untenable, though I'd be interested in your ideas as to why. What kind of effects do you foresee, both on the level of the images themselves and their reception?
It's worth considering that similar loops have been in place for decades, in the area of market research, product design and advertising. Now, all of neoclassical economics is based on the concept of "consumer preferences," and discovering what consumers prefer is the official justification for market research; but it's clear that advertising has attempted, and in many cases succeeded, in shaping those preferences over generations. The preferences that people express today are, at least in part, artifacts of past advertising campaigns. Product design in the present reflects the influence of earlier products and associated advertising.
One of the primary fields of production in the overdeveloped societies is the field or product range of culture itself, such as movies and TV shows. In the case of TV, feedback loops have been employed systematically since the early 1950s, with the introduction of Nielsen's audiometer, a device that was directly attached to thousands of TVs. Today, TV shows and especially movies are not only used to define the cultural context of successive "generations'' (Gen X, etc). Marketers also use them as surrogates for the memories and affects of those generations. Of course these proxy memories cannot cover the full range of generational experience, but they have the immense advantage, for advertisers, of being fully knowable and therefore, calculable in their effects. The calculations may be more or less bullshit, but they are still employed and acted upon.
Blade Runner vividly demonstrated this cultural condition in the early 1980s, through the figure of the replicants with their implanted memories. The intensely targeted production of postmodern culture ensued, and has been carried on since then with the increasingly granular market research of surveillance capitalism, where the calculation of statistically probable behavior becomes a good deal more precise. The effect across the neoliberal period has been, not increasing standardization or authoritarian control, but instead, the rationalized proliferation of customizable products, whose patterns of use and modification, however divergent or "deviant" they may be, are then fed back into the design process. Not only the "quality of the image" seems to degrade in this process. Instead, culture in general seems to degrade, even though it also becomes more inclusive and more diverse at the same time.
AI is poised to do a lot of things - but one of them is to further accelerate the continual remaking of generational preferences for the needs of capitalist marketing. Do you think that's right, Francis? What other consequences do you see? And above all, what to do in the face of a seemingly inevitable trend?
best, Brian