Re: <nettime> The non-Baudrillardian Good (perhaps) and AI

[Frédéric Neyrat via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Thanks for your email, Cade (I'm just discovering the New Design Congress
community and read your “para-real” article),

If we do a little political fiction and imagine, in the case of the USA,
another Independence Day, it's hard to imagine the abolition of GenAI not
being part of the picture.

The two illustrations you give at the end of your email demonstrate that
any overhaul of US society would have to be, let's say the word, moral, I
don't mean neither traditionalist nor reactionary, but moral in the sense
that the psychic landscape of AI is the devastation of the Good.  What I
mean is that political reforms would not be enough to cure the damage to
the symbolic that economic techno-fascism produces.

best,

FN


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On Sat, Mar 1, 2025 at 8:46 AM Cade Diehm via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:

> It is very popular to describe skepticism and rejection of generative
> artificial intelligence as a form of neoreactionary/"neo-luddite" fear.
> Such a claim has infested the discourse more widely - from bewildered
> policymakers to the chittering LinkedIn class and everyone in between.
> So I am surprised to have had such a visceral reaction to this email
> thread, given the likelihood that such a discussion would eventually
> crop up here.
>
> Backing up to an argument floated in mid February: To compare suspicions
> of generative AI against those leveled at photographic camera is to
> reveal a very severe gap in thinking about the interplay between
> technology and the world. Yes, both "have
> [shutter/prompts/aperture/weights] to tweak, both had a technological
> rise and a consequential impact on the societies they were birthed in.
> Both strive to produce realism from the machine. Both offer democratic
> access to a kind of artistry. But the similarities end there.
>
> The camera never offered to be a painter or an illustrator, it offered
> realism. In order to use the camera, one needs mobility and the ability
> and agency to compose both the objects and light of the world and the
> viewfinder into a freeze frame. For a long time, the camera was a
> one-way fragile skill of chemistry, delicate archival and taste -
> developing and storing film, and selecting ideal frames. The camera was
> bound to the immediacy of the world around its operator. Much of the
> pushback at the time was contained to a select labour force: portraiture
> painters whose work was threatened by the introduction of such tools.
>
> In contrast, the conceptual centre of generative AI is /trickery/, and
> this trickery extends throughout the entire technology - from its
> conceptual core to its human-computer interface. To start with the
> system of generation itself: whether image synthesis or LLM text output,
> such tools are the sums of averages, a statistical best-guess of a
> user's text input disguised as authoritative, creative and informed.
> Moving closer to the user, such tools are often cloaked in interfaces
> that mimic human interaction, play up personality and flatter the user
> through chat-style interfaces or voice. They are positioned as SaaS
> products designed to synthesize reality, where output quality and the
> inability to detect their use are seen as desirable performance metrics.
>
> One just needs to look at the breathless tripe put forth by doomsday
> luminaries
> (https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/),
> or the childlike delusional wonder in communities such as r/ChatGPT to
> see how the constellation of fraud can cultivate a fantastical belief in
> the ghost in the machine, near religious-levels of fear of fervor of
> consciousness in silicon, in systems assembled from nothing more ELIZA
> meeting the mechanical turk. This is plato's cave at its most
> unsophisticated (but energy intensive).
>
> The trickery extends beyond the AI, its interface and its models,
> perpetuated outwards by the user. Let's use this very mailing list
> thread as the example: Pit disclosed their use of ChatGPT, in the 12.02
> initial email, but only once I had read the entire email did I realise
> that this did not come from Pit's own mouth or mind. Why, then, should I
> read this, who is this for? Should Pit had chosen to not disclose their
> use of AI, it is up to me to discern whether such communication is borne
> from within or from outside the consciousness of the person at the other
> end of the screen. This means that I must be suspicious of all text and
> imagery that I encounter. Here, I am suspicious of their fabrication,
> rather than applying actual critical media theory. That, too, is trickery.
>
> The shitty outcome of the photographic camera was a glut of bad
> portraiture companies, police mugshots, colonial dominance
> (https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/the-imperial-sensorium/) and
> wedding photographers. The shitty outcome of AI is a world where image
> and thought is at best soft-constrained by mathematical averages, unable
> to reach into the novel, whilst being completely severed from the id and
> ego of the individual who would have previously been the primary source
> of such expression. At same time, any chud can shower me in outputs from
> the rancid genocidal insides of his brain with zero effort. All he needs
> is working, well worn, high interest credit card. The two technologies
> and their philosophies and contexts are not and never will be analogous.
>
> In other words, the shitty outcomes of the photographic camera are
> /systemic/, whereas the shitty outcomes of generative AI//are
> /existential. /Sneering at the resistance to AI while invoking a now
> ubiquitous technology (the camera) as an inevitable steamrolling of said
> resistance is to offer a fundamentally incomplete view of how this might
> play out.
>
> All of this assumes that the economic ascendance of AI follows its
> treasonous predecessors of the 'sharing economy', an untested and lazy
> assumption that very well may not manifest, due to the economic and
> material costs of AI and the rapid deceleration of 'progress' by the
> industry.
>
> We are now close to fifty years into 'the computer revolution'. There
> exists a lot of good writing to rebuke the Californian ideology that now
> canvases the world unquestioned, maybe some at nettime are familiar with
> this writing, no? In the context of AI, a thought: Maybe—given the
> computer's unbreakable ties to cybernetics and the bloodlust freak hawks
> of the US military-industrial complex—it is those who embrace
> cyberspace, software and its affects who are neoreactionary, or at least
> deeply conservative. The computer is not a fringe curiosity any more;
> the computer is as ubiquitous as the car, metastasizing into every
> corner of our lives. What progressive dream can be found in such
> domination, especially one so utterly tied to sources of capital for its
> continued existence?
>
> AI is a reinforcement of this form of neoreactionary dream living: a
> paternalistic hierarchical system, dressed as liberation but wholly
> dependent on top-down free market economics and extraction. An easy life
> for lying about your love for your husband
> (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0BXZhdDqZM) or allowing you to
> automate away the (https://getpickle.ai/) /managerial feudalism/
> hellscape you live in, to borrow from David Graber. To embrace AI within
> the bounds of the current market forces and product landscape, /and/ at
> the expense of those who are suspicious of such technologies, is to
> embrace the stagnant material conditions of the moment with a technology
> that likely reinforces these artificial limits.
>
> Cade
>
>
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