Shitty Automation": Art, Artificial Intelligence, Humans in the Loop (original) (raw)
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The 'Social Paradigm' of Automation
Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelten, 2024
The lineage of industrialisation that began in the eighteenth century continues with the development of artificial intelligence (AI). It reveals a heuristic apparent in/as the social paradigm that defines labour as interchangeable with the machinery it operates. Placing AI into a socio-cultural context with the industrial revolution reveals the on-going impacts of the social disparities created by capitalist production in the nineteenth century that were justified by reifying Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy concerning judgement (human agency) continue to shape contemporary developments. Examining this philosophical justification and its influence illuminates a social paradigm focused on the replacement of labour with automation. This interdisciplinary approach links moral and aesthetic claims to the questions of labour to reveal a heuristic in which workers were cast as the “intellectual organs” of the machine, anticipating “machine learning” and other forms of digital automation that replace intelligent labour. This cultural foundation developes from the continuity of technological changes that defined each stage of industrialisation through disparate social, cultural and aesthetic claims about machinery and the social significance of the industrial factory. The regimentation of labour by industrialization concerned nineteenth century artists and critics whose ideas established an archetype whose structural effects shape and constrain the contemporary implementation of automation and AI.
The Automation of Automating Automation: Automation in the AI Industry
2019
First, I'm going to talk about why machine learning is a different type of automation from previous forms. Then I will show how the labour of producing machine learning tech is being automated and briefly discuss the relations of workers towards it. I will argue that AutoML complicates critical theorizations of automation from two Marxian schools of thought: labour process theory and post-operaismo. Finally, I will suggest that AutoML indicates the need for a conceptual shift from automation to autonomization.
Cogent Arts & Humanities, 2017
This article compares two examples of industrial patronage in the late 1950s. The first is the 1958 filming of Le Chant du styrène by filmmaker Alain Resnais, with a voiceover of a poem by Raymond Queneau, with funding from the Péchiney firm. The second is the 1959 exhibition Forces et rythmes de l'industrie ("Forces and Rhythmes of Industry") by painter Reynold Arnould, organized with funding from 12 major French companies. We show how similar these two operations were, from two perspectives: first, the logic behind arts patronage for major firms of the time, and second, the esthetic and social issues at stake for the representation of industry in the context of the debate on automation. An historic and esthetic analysis of Resnais' film and Arnould's canvases provides an opportunity to discuss the societal concerns of this period of accelerated industrial development in Europe in the 1950s. We then look at the perspective of these artists in light of the work of sociologists from this period, who were conducting fieldwork in the same factories that Resnais filmed and Arnould painted.
The mechanical Turk: a short history of ‘artificial artificial intelligence’
Cultural Studies, 2023
This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing automaton known as Mechanical Turk and the Amazon microwork platform of the same name. The original Mechanical Turk was a life-sized automaton made in 1770 and publicly exhibited until the mid-1800s, and which played games of chess with the audience. Its movements were fully mechanical, but even more remarkably, it was promoted as the world’s first ‘thinking machine,’ deciding each move of the chess pieces for itself. From the outset, it was widely assumed that the Mechanical Turk was a hoax, and that a human must be hidden inside the machine, directing the game. But it was a clever hoax whose trick was never discovered, and widely admired as such. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk job platform functions in a similarly open way, this paper argues, as a sort of open technological hoax. Mechanical Turk provides a source of human cognitive labour that can be used to invisibly operate digital systems and programs that are widely assumed to be fully automated. Artificial intelligence is a twenty-first century thinking machine, it requires a human brain to make it work. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a marketplace in which companies can hire piecemeal cognitive labour to patch gaps and train programs to keep those systems functioning. Providing what Jeff Bezos has called ‘artificial artificial intelligence,’ Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, like Kempelen’s automaton, both draws attention to and obfuscates the limits of automation and artificial intelligence. Taking the two iterations of the Mechanical Turk as rich cultural figures of automation for their respective periods, this paper will argue that the open secret of their artificial artificial intelligence is itself a form of misdirection that hides other, more successfully guarded secrets: the true extent of that labour, and the conditions in which it is performed.
AI, Automation, Creativity, Cognitive Labor
This observation cues Jens Schröter’s approach, following the trace of the Russian formalists, and especially Victor Shklovsky’s ideas of ‘de -automatization’ in his paper. Schröter suggests that, if we want to philosophize upon AI, generalizing the (subversive) way the arts are making use of it, we have to consider the notion of art as a means of becoming aware of the deep (language-based) routines and patterns that shape our reality and consciousness. In this way, new perceptions of us and / in the world are made possible only by tearing apart the ‘automated’ functional patterns of modernity. Therefore, according to Schröter via Shklovsky, the ‘function’ of AI is not to create automatic art but, on the contrary, to de-automatize a reality running on automatization. By that means, AI itself even might provide a critical tool enlightening the ‘brave new world’ that some self-proclaimed gurus and prophets of AI are promising.
Art, AI and Culture, 2022
This is a low resolution preview of a book. If you find it useful or interesting, please consider buying a copy. Art, AI and Culture interrogates the aesthetic heritage of Modernism as it informs contemporary cultural applications of AI which demonstrate there is no escape from the kaleidoscopic lineage of colonialism where the status of "human" and all the rights that entails were withheld from the colonized in general, and from slaves, labor, and women specifically. This analysis theorizes the social identity threat posed by AI's challenges to existing social, cultural, political, and economic orders. Digital technology is not exempt from this historical lineage that transforms familiar questions of economic displacement caused by machine learning and digital automation into new battles in an on-going conflict over social status and position. This cultural approach to AI reveals the ways that it transforms expressions of identity, leisure and luxury into opportunities for profit extraction. Social phenomena, (including racism, sexism, and nationalism), capture individuals in a web of systemic control where digital automation provides a mechanism preserving the existing hierarchies and social status that it might otherwise challenge. Drawing on a reconception of capitalism as a proxy for social status and position, this study critiques the fantasy that replacing all human labor will create a fully automated luxury utopia without bias, oppression, or social change.
Journal of Human-Technology Relations, 2023
Artificial intelligence (AI); DALL-E; art; aesthetics; philosophy of technology; process philosophy; performance AI image generators such as DALL-E 2 are deep learning models that enable users to generate digital images based on natural language text prompts. The impressive and often surprising results leave many people puzzled: is this art, and if so, who created the art: the human or the AI? These are not just theoretical questions; they have practical ethical and legal implications, for example when raising authorship and copyright issues. This essay offers two conceptual points of entrance that may help to understand what is going on here. First it briefly discusses the question whether this is art and who or what is the artist based on aesthetics, philosophy of art, and thinking about creativity and computing. Then it asks the question regarding humantechnology relations. It shows that existing notions such as instrument, extension, and (quasi) other are insufficient to conceptualize the use of this technology, and proposes instead to understand what happens as processes and performances, in which artistic subjects, objects, and roles emerge. It is concluded that based on most standard criteria in aesthetics, AI image generation can in principle create art, and that the process can be seen as poietic performances involving humans and non-humans potentially leading to the emergence of new artistic (quasi)subjects and roles in the process.
2019
Intelligence Everywhere: What artistic explorations can tell us through and about technological development presented on Sept 18 2019 during the Humanities and Public Life Conference at Dawson College, Montréal, Canada Recent developments in machine learning and what John McCarthy has named artificial intelligence in 1956 have repeatedly been portrayed in the media as competing with human creativity. Binary narratives that (narcissistically) anthropomorphize and present technological advancements as either miraculous or antagonistic spread fear and fascination amongst the public. Machines, some threaten, will take your job as an artist, a lawyer, a taxi driver, a doctor, an accountant, and govern us … In this presentation I wish to draw a historical lineage between ideas that were at the roots of the British branch of cybernetics comparing and contrasting the worldview that underlined it with the approach taken by the founders of the Artificial Intelligence project in 1956. I wish to establish the link between the cybernetic worldview and the recent developments in machine learning that we commonly refer to as Artificial Intelligence. (AI) These powerful discoveries are currently used to generate images, natural language, soundscapes and videos that can be mistaken to have been produced by people. This has pushed some to declare that the machines were themselves creative. I will argue that while the tools do display what N.Katherine Hayles calls non-conscious cognition, a process that is found everywhere in nature, creativity, in the realm of art, is a concept rooted in the self-reflexive sense-making ability of the person orchestrating it as well as in the social, cultural and political context in which it is being examined. Presenting creativity from the point of view of the art world, I will argue that the definition of art does not lie solely in the formal aesthetics of the object produced but is a shifting culturally constructed concept that is by no means negated by machine “imagination” or “creativity”. The notion of authorship in relation with automation in the creative process have been explored thoroughly in the realm of art ever since, for example, Marcel Duchamp presented his readymade, Walter Benjamin published his famous text in 1937 and Roland Barth examined aspects of the topic in 1967. Early cybernetic prototypes that displayed cognitive behaviours as well as artworks that use automation in their creative process will be presented as well as a selection of recent art practises that explore and comment on the use of statistical models or what Hunger calls “enhanced pattern recognition” systems such as artificial neural networks and adversarial neural networks. (Hunger 2017) These artworks often present advanced technical tools as one component of a network (Latour) /agencement (Deleuze) in which humans interact with them in complex and intricate ways. Through the examination of a selection of projects by artists from various backgrounds, such as the recent work and writings by indigenous artists as well as local and international artists, I wish to point to some of the shortcomings they bring to light as well as how they engage us into some much-needed reflection about the technologies we generate and how they hold the potential to redefine us and the environment.
Anthropomorphism and AI ideology. An analysis of human-machine interaction in art and society
Anthropomorphism and AI ideology an analysis of human-machine interaction in art and society, 2023
This essay takes a critical look at the ideology that underpins anthropomorphizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and considers the implications of modeling human interaction. It argues that this approach, which is motivated by a desire to gain widespread acceptance, is problematic due to the fact that it perpetuates harmful cultural biases, misrepresents the line between humanity and technology, and raises ethical concerns regarding the creation of artificial beings that are capable of simulating emotions and consciousness. In the essay, there is a call for a fundamental reevaluation of the societal implications of anthropomorphizing AI, as well as a critical examination of the relationship that exists between technology and humanity. It also calls for a more ethical methodology and development of artificial intelligence systems, one that takes into account the potential consequences of blurring the boundaries between the artificial and the human. Anthropomorphism and AI ideology an analysis of human-machine interaction in art and society