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“The world is a better place with 8 billion people than it was when 50 million people were (kind of) living in caves. I am confident that the value and progress in humanity will accelerate extraordinarily after welcoming artificial beings into our community.”
– Computer graphics legend
John Carmack , anticipating humans soon working alongside AI agents. Recently resigned from Meta, his new startup Keen Technologies is squarely focused on
artificial general intelligence . [quote edited]
“We’re using this very powerful tool that is able to take information and integrate it in a way that no human mind is able to do, for better or for worse.”
– Stanford climate scientist
Noah Diffenbaugh , on using machine learning to model anthropocentric warming. In
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , his team’s model predicts we’ll blast past agreed-upon climate thresholds. As Brown University researcher
Kim Cobb put it: “This paper may be the beginning of the end of the 1.5C target.”
“AI images don’t glitch, they gloop. They streak and striate. It’s the result of how these systems seek out images from the fuzzy noise they start with. While noise is an end state of a bad television broadcast, it’s the start state of AI images.”
– Systems design researcher and artist
Eryk Salvaggio , on the origins of “blobby” GAN aesthetics (as seen in the “smeary smorgasbord” that is Refik Anadol’s MoMA installation
Unsupervised ).
“They found a 95% similarity between the Madonnas in the two paintings and an 86% similarity in the Child.”
“What Unsupervised insinuates, 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.”
– Critic
Ben Davis , demystifying
Refik Anadol ’s AI “alternative-art-history simulator”
on view at MoMA . “The effect is pleasant—like an extremely intelligent lava lamp,” Davis writes. “What it is
not is anything like what MoMA says it is: an experience that ‘reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been.’”
“We were each fighting a version of ourself that looked similar but that was uncanny, twisted in a way to which we didn’t consent.”
– Cartoonist
Sarah Andersen , on the similarities between troll- and AI-generated “shadow selves.” First, the alt-right hijacked Anderson’s work to spread neo-Nazi ideology, then
Stable Diffusion allowed for easy imitation of her and concept artist
Greg Rutkowski ’s distinct styles.
London’s V&A Museum announces the acquisition of Sougwen Chung ’s 2017 drawing MEMORY (D.O.U.G. 2) for its permanent collection. Part of the Chinese-Canadian artist’s body of painterly robot collaborations, the acquisition includes the RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) model that Chung trained on years of her own drawings to co-create the piece. It’s the first artifact of its kind to be acquired by a cultural institution, the V&A notes.
“Talking to the user interface layer rather than to the AI layer is like talking to Robocop when really you’re trying to talk to Murphy.”
–
Kimchi and Chips co-founder Elliot Woods, critiquing Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s
ChatGPT interview style. The Channel 4 News host merely scratched the tool’s semi-scripted surface to reveal what creator
OpenAI wants people to see, Woods notes. “In order to get past that mask you must
not ask it a question that it is programmed to answer, but one that requires all of its unconscious thinking to respond to.” [quote edited]
“I’m worried. I could see people signing away contracts right now that could have really detrimental impacts on their future ability to make work as themselves.”
– American composer and “computer musician”
Holly Herndon , on how AI complicates intellectual property. “I want people to understand how powerful these systems are and how having sovereignty over training data is really important,” Herndon says, encouraging artists to experiment with her vocal model
Holly+ .
“Unsupervised,” a solo show by artist Refik Anadol opens at New York’s MoMA. Working with the metadata for the museum’s 130,000 artworks, the Turkish-American artist’s eponymous AI model (image) fluidly morphs through the latent aesthetic space of the collection. Viewers revel in flowing transitions between myriad possible artworks, the experience subtly intensified by camera, microphone, and local climate data-informed real-time interactivity, tweets Anadol.
Daniel Franke ’s CGI short Ich sitze in der Wolke (2022) premieres at the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival in Kassel, Germany. In his film, the German artist and researcher takes viewers deep into the digital cloud, a GAN -generated post-nature dreamscape where semiconductors, bitcoins, electricity, rare earth minerals, and crystals manifest to force questions about “environmental sin and digital evolution.”
German artist and designer Philipp Schmitt publishes Blueprints for Intelligence , a “visual history of artificial neural networks from 1943 to 2020.” Compiling 56 diagrams sourced from machine learning research papers, the web project invites visitors to trace key tendencies in AI evolution. “It draws connections between the visual representations of neural networks and the researchers’ conception of cognition,” Schmitt writes in his introduction.
“Consider how we think of AI as a black box and thus in accounting for its harms demand transparency or explainability of algorithms rather than of the institutions that create and maintain them.”
– Cultural scientist and AI researcher
Maya Indira Ganesh , contemplating the “performative force of AI imaginaries” with a thorough “metaphorology” published in
ACM Interactions and as part of Philipp Schmitt’s
Blueprints for Intelligence visual history
Probing for human qualities that escape capture in AI training datasets, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Kyle McDonald ’s new collaboration Unlearning Language (2022) opens at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), Japan. Both an experiential performance—“a one-act play for four,” as described by McDonald —and an interactive installation, the American artists (with support from Rhizomatiks ) conjure a “futuristic AI that tries to help us become more human.”
OUT NOW :
Ilan Manouach
Fastwalkers
Co-created with AI (GAN, GPT-3) and a team of experts, Manouach’s
synthetic manga is a nonlinear meditation on deep learning that explores the inherent computational qualities of comics to play with the latent space lurking in the reader’s cognition.
American singer and composer Holly Herndon releases a cover of Dolly Parton’s 1974s country music hit Jolene using the her AI voice model suite Holly+ . Equally haunting: In the accompanying video, digital artist and animator Sam Rolfes pilots a Herndon 3D model on an XR LED stage using motion capture. “What I like most about Sam’s video is how he captures the fantasy of performing as someone else,” Herndon writes on Twitter . “He performs as me just as I perform as Dolly.”
“Might there be a role that institutions could play if we know that sound and music is healing? Can that open up new possibilities for arts funding, for policy, for what is considered a therapeutic experience or an artistic experience?”
– Writer and musician
K Allado-McDowell , on the questions driving their new AI opera
Song of the Ambassadors . The piece premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center on Oct 25th with the support of composer Derrick Skye, visual artist Refik Anadol, and neuroscientists Ying Choon Wu and Alex Khalil.
Italian computer scientist Giacomo Miceli launches The Infinite Conversation , an AI-generated, never-ending voice chat between filmmaker Werner Herzog and philosopher Slavoj Žižek . Described as a love letter to the two icons, the exchange aims to raise awareness of the ease of AI voice synthesis. “Any fool with a laptop can do this,” Miceli warns and wonders: “What would our favourite people do, if we had unlimited access to their minds?”
“Kim Jung Gi left us less than [a week ago] and AI bros are already ‘replicating’ his style and demanding credit. Vultures and spineless, untalented losers.”
– Comic-book writer
Dave Scheidt ,
blasting the release of an
AI model trained on the renowned South Korean illustrator’s work within days after his passing. “In effect, manga and anime are acting as an early testing ground for AI art-related ethics and copyright liability,” notes reporter
Andrew Deck in his analysis.
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