I hate to start by mentioning Picasso, but one of his popular quotes sums it up perfectly: "Good artists copy, great artists steal". If we understand human imagination as "thinking with images", it seems that the process of synthetic imagery generation is not far from what we humans do when imagining. I don't want to compare human vs machine intelligence, but I think it's interesting to remember that almost everything we humans do is a remix anyway.
It's fascinating that you say that AI creates monsters. Thank goodness! The internet was full of clean images, sanitised for the neoliberal eye in which everything has to be "normal". AI glitches (creating what we call "monsters") are precisely what help us to deal with the discomfort: images that are alien, strange bodies, the mix of subjects that we humans have not dared to mix. Maybe it is time of the return of the hopeful monster.
If it is true that AI erases nuances or aspects of humanity, I think this may be just the answer to your question: how can we construct more alternative narratives within AI? In the era in which we are precisely trying to move away from demotivating anthropocentrism, the loss of human nuance may be what we need. That mirror shows us the capitalist realism in which humanity is still enveloped.
---
Pierre (22.01): Hmm, I agree that the lack of individualism that AI ushers in might be productive in that it highlights the group rather than the personalized, but wouldn't using AI systems for alternatives be similar to using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house? I like what was mentioned in the first paragraph as "harking back to Web 1", i.e. doing less as a result of witnessing too much of the more.
Also, a nice reference on scrapism.
---
To Pierre's point above: I think it is always important to extend Lorde's quote here in the full: "For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." So even though AI might not be able to bring about genuine change, it is still an important part of the struggle for alternatives to temporarily beat the masters at their own game! This is imo the real heritage of cut-up, détournement, etc.
To Kendal: I think that there are some self-organized communities on genAI that are interesting, especially the Eden.Art project by Gene Kogan & co that emerged from a Discord-server. While their internal mythology is totally ridiculous (a sort of Martian Christianity), the tools that they co-develop are generally rooted in artistic practices and foster a sense of collectivity. /Asker
Supernice to read a text that is somehow both critical and optimistic/light/inspiring. I like the idea that new technologies should be approached through the exploration of agency (instead of doing what marketing people tell us to do or what design affords on the surface level). But concerning Pierre's comment, maybe we shouldn't limit the idea of agency only to creative practices? Isn't there a risk that aesthetical thinking would lead to sort of surface politics (where we use instruments without thinking about where they came from and how our actions support those companies)? To what extent we can and should make cuteness political? (Anya) P.S. excited to hear that you worked with Sadgrl! Let's maybe talk about it outside of this platform later? And see if we will find any fitting connection between our texts that we could highlight.