Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic AI (original) (raw)

Abstract

With artificial intelligence making inroads into the arts, a critique of aesthetic AI still needs to be written. To this end, this article argues that first, one must do away with the "Promethean anxiety" that assesses machine-created works by the standards of human-made ones, and second, one must turn to the technical substrate of such works for criteria of aesthetic critique. The article takes digital literature as an example and suggests a distinction between the "sequential paradigm" of linear algorithms and the "connectionist paradigm" of neural networks. Such media-specificity finds its aesthetic correlate in the medium-specificity of text and image. Promethean Anxiety; or, Creativity as the Last Di erentia Let me start with an observation. It was recorded in 1942 by German philosopher Günther Anders. Having escaped the Nazis and living in California at the time, Anders brought with him the distanced sensibility of the European exile who, not unlike his fellow émigré Theodor W. Adorno, understood America, and California in particular, as the intensified expression of life in capitalist modernity. In a journal entry, which would later become the first chapter of his book The Obsolescence of Human Beings, he described a visit to a technology exhibition in which a friend acted rather curiously: as if he were ashamed to be a human and not a machine. This, Anders noted, was a novel phenomenon, "an entirely new pudendum …; a form of shame that did not exist in the past. I will provisionally call it 'Promethean shame.'" This was to denote "the shame felt when 203

Figures (3)

After defining the function combine in lines 3-12—a subroutine that in the end assembles the final text—Montfort shows how Beckett's own text can be understood as a set of elements of a list variable (sometimes also called an array), that is, a single variable that con- tains a series of items. Here in line 13, the variable is called voices, and its values are “sang,” “cried,” “stated,” “murmured”—exactly the verbs that are permutated in Watt. But because there is a pound sign in front of this line, the Python interpreter recognizes that the line is merely a comment that should not be executed and ignores it. Beckett’s concept is still present in the code, but has been, as it were, switched off. ee a 2s eT s. SS ar ee

After defining the function combine in lines 3-12—a subroutine that in the end assembles the final text—Montfort shows how Beckett's own text can be understood as a set of elements of a list variable (sometimes also called an array), that is, a single variable that con- tains a series of items. Here in line 13, the variable is called voices, and its values are “sang,” “cried,” “stated,” “murmured”—exactly the verbs that are permutated in Watt. But because there is a pound sign in front of this line, the Python interpreter recognizes that the line is merely a comment that should not be executed and ignores it. Beckett’s concept is still present in the code, but has been, as it were, switched off. ee a 2s eT s. SS ar ee

Figure 3: Convolutional neural network (left), recurrent neural network (right), adapted from Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019). Bajohr / Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic Al

Figure 3: Convolutional neural network (left), recurrent neural network (right), adapted from Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019). Bajohr / Algorithmic Empathy: Toward a Critique of Aesthetic Al

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References (16)

  1. Obvious Collective, Edmond de Belamy, GAN algorithm, inkjet on canvas, Obvious Collective website, 2018, https://obvious-art.com/portfolio/edmond-de-belamy.
  2. See for an overview Grant D. Taylor, When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
  3. Ian Bogost, "The AI-Art Gold Rush Is Here," Atlantic (March 6, 2019), https://www .theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/ai-created-art-invades-chelsea-gallery -scene/584134/. See for contemporary artistic engagements with AI: Joanna Zylinska, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020).
  4. These are no longer the largest models, but their relative ease of use as well as the integration of GPT-3 into a pay-for-use service have made them the de facto standard for the nonprofessional use of natural language generation; open source initiatives like GPT-NeoX (EleutherAI) have, at least as of this writing, garnered far fewer users; see https://www.eleuther.ai. On the political and ethical problems of such language mod- els, see Emily Bender et al., "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Mod- els Be Too Big?" in FAccT '21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Ac- countability, and Transparency (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2021), pp. 610-23.
  5. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (Notre Dame: U. Notre Dame Press, 2009), p. 3.
  6. Jessica Pressman, Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2014).
  7. See Florian Cramer, Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination (Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, 2005).
  8. Scott Rettberg, Electronic Literature (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
  9. I make this point in Hannes Bajohr, "Das Reskilling der Literatur," in Code und Konzept: Literatur und das Digitale, ed. Hannes Bajohr (Berlin: Frohmann, 2016), pp. 7-21.
  10. Hans Blumenberg, "'Imitation of Nature': Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being," in History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, ed. Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press, 2020), pp. 316- 57;
  11. Hans Blumenberg, "Paul Valérys möglicher Leonardo da Vinci: Vortrag in der Aka- demie der Künste in Berlin am 21. April 1966," Forschungen zu Paul Valéry/Recherches Valéryennes 25 (2012): 193-227.
  12. Rosalind Krauss, "A Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condi- tion (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999);
  13. Florian Cramer, "Nach dem Koitus oder nach dem Tod? Zur Begriffsverwirrung von 'Postdigital', 'Post-Internet' und 'Post-Media,'" Kunstforum International 242 (2016): 54-67;
  14. Alan Liu, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age (Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 2018).
  15. Liu, Friending the Past (above, n. 48), p. 227 n18.
  16. Clement Greenberg, "Avantgarde and Kitsch," in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1989), pp. 3-21; Clement Greenberg, "Towards a Newer Laocoon," in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, 1939-44 (Chicago: U. Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 23-38.