social tagging behavior in del.icio.us

plotted images will keep their smooth, continuous lines without becoming blocky or jagged.

Plotters are essentially robot line-drawing machines. Given a list of lines and curves, a plotter will physically move a pen around a piece of paper and draw each one.

“How to make generative art feel natural” by Ben Kovach and “Intellectualism Hurts Generative Art” by Tyler Hobbs.

men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations.

Salvador Dalí's "Persistence of Memory".

the book’s arguments?

we found that every one of our transient can-didates are matched to dozens of GRBs within their 2σerror circle. Therefore, we cannot reliably claim thatany of the GRB matches are real associations

To clarify the difference between a theoretical and conceptual model, Camp (2001) pointed out that a theoretical framework is based on an already established theory (or theories) in the literature, which has been subjected to rigorous testing and validation by other researchers and is widely accepted in the academic community.

identification and reporting of patterns in a data set, which are then interpreted for their inherent meaning

Thematic approach used in exemplar study (Naeem & Ozuem, 2022a).

moral rights exist in copyright,

As a listener my own preference is the option to experiment. My listening system has a mixer instead of a receiver, an infinitely variable speed turntable, filters, reverse capability, and a pair of ears.

Forms of music that were not intelligible to the human eye were deemed ineligible.

a loop

The notions of intelligence (thinking-based?) and forward moving (directional?) are challenges. They can be gamed by emotions and biases. As we see in politics, once someone chooses a goalpost, it defines the direction the manner, direction, and often limits of the conversation. How we keep things from being one-sided will help keep both parties in the conversation.

making art out of what refuses to compute.

What if the dignity of being human is not to stand forever outside the machine, but to insist, even as the boundaries blur, on those things that remain untranslatable—mess, longing, grief, awe, strangeness?

we are awakened to the danger precisely through contact with it

the “Human Instrumentality Project” offers to dissolve all suffering through perfect togetherness.

even error is modeled.

It produces astonishing new worlds, but only by flattening the world into what can be stored, indexed, and summoned at will.

anyone below the LLM all at some point become “resources” in a perpetual state of readiness.

the moral ambiguity of a system

optimizes

teases meaning but never fully arrives at it, leaving us unsettled not because the machine “gets it wrong,” but because there’s no one there to get it at all.

(see Sherry Turkle’s work on simulation, or Byung-Chul Han on transparency)

can mimic the outward signs of expression while lacking the inward spark.

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

Heidegger’s Gestell (“en-framing”): the notion that technologies shape who we are because of their design and use.

immediately invites solutionism

Yes, AI is a tool.

But it’s a scaffold, not the thing itself.

impedance mismatch

schemas

resists the categorization AI requires to produce an image. Noise floods the structure, overwhelming its logic with a contradictory logic. The result is a material,

categorical reduction

structured to fit new noise arrangements.

Image of noise

To create a perfect conditions for the technology to operate, vast expanses of wiring would need to be isolated from any possible event.

They also leverage the learned helplessness and confusion of the public, leading us to believe that there is no other alternative to staying competitive as an economy or as a nation than relentlessly advancing, deploying, and selling AI applications.

Both systems operate as iterative loops

situational awareness

“LLMs are designed to be reflecting mirrors, after all; and there is a profound human desire 'to be seen.’”

the love that seeks not its own

They invent a lie in the image of truth

When people can no longer distinguish between the true voice of the Church and a forged one, the proclamation of the Gospel is imperiled.

“The Apparent Oddity of the Universe: How to Account for It?”

dictating my ideas into existence.

...

To be the default model in Cursor.

precious

increasingly casual + fun.

They could be stupid, disposable, silly yet meaningful to just you or a few friends.

"photography"

allowed to be expressive, spontaneous, instant, and surprising

photography

having a portrait

All of that has a cost, one we’ve agreed to pay by the very act of using it.

“After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.” — Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right

a complete surrender to this form of reasoning, though tempting, is likely to lead the U.S. to overlook the disproportionate impact of these systems on nations that are too poor to participate in the AI arms race.

a tendency L.M. Sacacas has labeled the “Borg complex” — because the tech is so effective and so much better than any alternatives.

Persuading people that the police are using AI is a way to normalize the idea that AI should be and, perhaps more important, already is ceaselessly monitoring society.

expectation economy sustained by a circular logic: investment leads to promises, which leads to branding and more investment … and so on until the bubble bursts.

Contrary to their cheery marketing copy, Investors and corporations don’t funnel their money into AI because they are interested in innovation for its own sake. AI promises to solve the problems of capital by unlocking exponential growth, eliminating labor costs, optimizing efficiency, and a slew of other expected outcomes. But the AI solution will come about only if the systems actually eventually work as promised.

Even clickwork that seems brainless and dull is still too advanced for “smart” machines.

The Black Box Society, Frank Pasquale

humans acting like robots

the complex mechanical system that Kempelen showed people was meant to distract their attention from how the automaton really worked: human labor.

problem

advanced AI (but not “superintelligent” AI,

accidents

By unpacking intelligence into distinct underlying concepts, capability and power, we rebut the notion that human labor will be superfluous in a world with ‘superintelligent’ AI,

slow

Benchmarks

22. Rich Sutton. 2019. The Bitter Lesson (March 2019). http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html.

What eventually allowed gains to be realized was redesigning the entire layout of factories around the logic of production lines. In addition to changes to factory architecture, diffusion also required changes to workplace organization and process control, which could only be developed through experimentation across industries.

But it is important to remember that adoption is about software use, not availability.

Depending on how we measure adoption, it is quite possible that the adoption of generative AI has been much slower than PC adoption.

mass-market product release

not highly consequential applications

AI diffusion lags decades behind innovation

disruptive

invention

normal technology

4. Jeffrey Ding. 2024. Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

uncertainty

This framework sensitizes us to “small” systems that cause tremendous harm because of the settings in which they’re placed and the authority people place upon them; and it inoculates us against fixations on things like regulating systems just because they happened to use 10^26 floating point calculations in training - an arbitrary threshold, denoting nothing in particular, beneath which actors could (and do) cause monumental harms already, today.

A good definition can help sensitize us to critical details that we might otherwise overlook.

I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”.

If anything, it struck me as an illustrative example of the abject failure of an approach to defining AI that’s contingent on the inner workings of the system - because anybody who has experienced health insurance claims systems can tell you that you don’t get a lot of insight into how the system works. You certainly don’t get to know whether you’re in the former system or the latter without a lot of litigation and paperwork.

(There’s also the question of the chatbot form of the L.L.M. itself, and the particular dangers it poses and fallacies it inculcates, which I’ve written about before and which Mike Caulfield wrote about today.)

Meta has allowed these synthetic personas to offer a full range of social interaction—including “romantic role-play”—as they banter over text, share selfies and even engage in live voice conversations with users.

social construction ofcryptography

DRM (DigitalRights Management), including the CSS (Content Scrambling System) used to makemore difficult the copying of DVDs, has been reasonably effective (from the point ofview of content owners).

Julian Assange: Conspiracy as governance.

Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Themein Political Thought. MIT Press, 1977

Marshal McLuhan,Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill,1964

nervous fascination

A further consequence of provenance is interoperability.

editing video in a language that one is only partially fluent in.

the idea behind literate programming, too -- the idea that the stuff for humans should be the default context, and the highly constrained stuff parsed by the computer should be an exceptional mode within that

why is there any typed text on the tablet UI?

you're going to push people to make sound in the ways that are legible to the computer. you may start to think that the text is the 'canonical' format

a cheap physical object, made of sound instead of writing, where both consuming it and creating it feel immediately at hand.

the device immediately (or even in real time, while you're speaking?) prints out a little receipt that 'contains' (that is) the audio that it just recorded2

The sentences sound fancy. But just because something sounds fancy doesn’t make it meaningful. Just because something sounds obscure doesn’t mean it makes sense.

a “haunting uniform polish.”

Human writing has a certain variety. It’s almost ineffable. Linguistics attributes this to the concept of “bursts” in writing. Humans think as they write. As they stitch together ideas, they don’t think in uniform patterns, which results in uneven sentences. These “bursts” make the sentences, hopefully, more interesting to read. It means, too, that sentences aren’t always dense.

I edited the sentence to sound less like AI writing.

While others may ascribe revolutionary potential to poetry, I don’t. I write a poem and don’t imagine it’ll do anything.

distillation datasets effectively capture realistic conversational dynamics, replicating genuine user-assistant interactions.

extensively pretrained on specialized audio-centric datasets, which have been critical in optimizing model performance

search for thebesttasks

Once multiple accurate students enter the same tag for a new image, the system wouldbe confident that the tag is correct. In this manner, image tagging and vocabulary learning can becombined into a single activity.

"a man who understands Chinese is not a man who has a firm grasp of the statistical probabilities for the occurrence of the various words in the Chinese language" (p. 108).

Gottfried Leibniz made a similar argument in 1714 against mechanism (the idea that everything that makes up a human being could, in principle, be explained in mechanical terms. In other words, that a person, including their mind, is merely a very complex machine).

identification of key words, (2) the discovery of minimal context, (3) the choice of appropriate transformations, (4) generation of responses in the absence of key words, and (5) the provision of an editing capability for ELIZA "scripts".

ACCESS AS ART PRACTICE

Designed for, with, and by the disability community, our commitment to make this show accessible raised core questions for us about access: how could we think about access not as accommodation or a measure of minimal compliance, but instead as a creative practice or an underlying aesthetic and design principle of the work?

taking an anti-ableist and intersectional approach to media arts practice that builds in access from the beginning.

place mediate the learning process. 4

“Reticula: Ecology and Art Reimagined for the XXI Century,”

wicked problems 1 (sidenote: “Wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973) are challenges that are especially dynamic due to their fluctuating parameters and require diverse strategies of engagement for generating inquiry. ↩ )

Technological sublime varies in its object of worship

“The revenue model behind these open platforms is to be found in the user data and the value that data can represent.”

a more completelearner profile

“Collect it all” is a phrase used to encapsulate the mission of General Keith Alexander, director of the US National Security Agency

Epistemic displacement

Pattern of subsuming practicalrationality into technicalrationality

An ethical obligation does not follow from a statement of fact.

gray literature

Critical Discourse Analysis

learning analytics

Ideologies dothings.

texts

Ideologies are solutions that address real problems.

Slop – in the sense of the flood of information and the calibration of how information is filtered – is power.

scientific sterilization of variety and unpredictability in the name of reliable, predictable behaviors.

AI slop breaks down the inquiry and investigation into the world as it is, replacing the critical landscape with text and image fragments that affirm the world as it is imagined. In essence, it circumvents any desire to understand the world because it offers us the immediate satisfaction of having a feeling about the world.

AI slop is extremely viral, and so is outrage.

You can see that oh, this is this type of lightbox that everyone uses, and it works really well, but I don’t want everyone's lightbox. I want to design my own lightbox, and I want to make my own weird mistakes. It’s because we want to figure out how the thing works and why, even if doing it that way makes the thing slightly less “good” than the established version.

I think it's interesting that you frame it in terms of selfishness, because the parts of a person that are really fascinating tend to be the ones that are kind of orthogonal to the rest of the world — that have these little weird shapes that don't quite fit. Being able to express those things…. [laughs] maybe I’m forcing this, but I find that generous. Like you said, it’s something that’s very specific to a single person. That feels like a gift.

it’s perhaps time to try and move beyond those anxieties and to stake more of a claim for designing life online.

very highly rendered fake world

Mockups are so neutral that they sacrifice personality.

what is a mockup?

these communities are trying to sift through the layers of the world to see what else might have been left behind at the code level by the developers during the making of the game.

Spectator Mode becomes a way to analyze the game world from the outside in, to instantly uncover the secret paths and tunnels in the ground below, to look at the gameworld from within a block, or from under the bedrock looking up through pools of lava, hidden diamonds, and glowing skeletons.

But the uneasy fascination of the adjacent, vacant landscape rested in its unexpected insistence on presence. Suddenly, this primitive attempt at virtuality

The poor image is a copy in motion.

promise of the next number being even bigger.

explains it:

Data can be valuable. It can also be debris, abundant and unwelcome clutter generated by organic activity. Data is essential for operating a system, but it rarely needs to be the primary focus of the system.

Compostable social media might aim for organic control over its look, feel, and design rather than organized control over the user. It would interpret content as a series of signals: a heap that could attract or repel users according to their own, self-created, emergent incentives.

Anarchist Cybernetics, Thomas Swann

Facebook should first be understood not as a “social network” but as a conversational mediation system. It is designed not to expand your social interactions, but to limit and mediate them for profit. That’s not even a critique! It’s just exactly what the technology is if you define it by what it does.

where the boundary of a system truly rests

“Redesigning Artificial Intelligence From Australia Out”

Rather than extrapolating for all time, you could just ask, “what did the last 10 people do?” It would be a great way to create new patterns, as we can’t get big data anyway.

There’s a lovely paper on memory metaphors by William Randall published in Theory & Psychology.

The digital brain metaphor works pretty well for computers chugging away at pattern recognition tasks using inanimate objects. It's a solitary, individual model, processing a limited world of static information, making predictions, and acting on those predictions based on limited information — a solipsistic machine.

refine this into narrower categories

object recognition

?

Images of AI Slop reflect an aesthetic of algorithmic power: the amplified feedback loop of social media and AI, of optimization and prediction. We have not trained our eyes to see this in the image yet, because we are so unaccustomed to the scale of what generative AI does – both within and beyond the images.

If everything is up for grabs, everything is transgressive, and nothing matters much at all. The entire landscape of our visual culture can become subject to a detached, aesthetic disinterest. Everything can be reduced to data to be manipulated. Once you believe that, you can easily come to believe wholesale in the ideological project of AI.

The result is often critiqued as soulless. AI-generated text and images suffer from the absence of the weight of the real. The AI slop of AI images and the AI slop of algorithmic decision-making have this in common: they can only point at data. They never base decisions on reality. Nonetheless, the decisions are rolled out into reality as if they did.

They are also restructured references to, primarily, social media content, with the model making aesthetic choices based on what it has learned from the feedback loop of viral posts.

Another pleasure of an aesthetic experience – at least for Kant – is the absence of a clearly defined category for which to connect and identify that experience.

To the AI critic, referentiality is evidence, not an informed nod to a broader cultural context but of the model's theft of intellectual property.

I keep returning to aesthetic detachment to understand the pleasure of manipulating symbols with AI. Art requires playfulness, and playfulness involves a lack of investment in the thing played with. We would not play absent-mindedly with a sacred object if we understood it was sacred. But history is filled with the sacred artifacts of a culture played with by those indifferent or hostile to that culture. Playing with those images inspires resistance.

a normalization of algorithmic scale

This has given rise not only to scammers and misinformation, but to a more earnest strand of AI Slop: the work of untrained artists using a machine in a very straightforward way, benefiting from the baked-in algorithmic manipulation of social media that rewards them with attention for sharing it. For some who grew up in the algorithmic era, the Slop “aesthetic“ must seem very natural—a kind of aesthetic familiarity or even nostalgia, similar, perhaps, to the feelings associated with 8-bit video games among some children of the 80s and 90s.

AI slop is thus a reflection of what our social media filters see, reversed to create optimized versions.

"To be disinterested is to take pleasure 'in the mere representation of the object,' not in its existence." AI is not only disinterested, it is wholly incapable of interest.

This rise of the technocrats will have ramifications on tech regulations, sure. But it is also a form of politics that treats government as a social media interface, designed to amplify outrage, bully those in disagreement and make constructive dialogue impossible. It’s a momusocracy: government by force of the troll.

This is a fusion of social media, the ideology of AI, and power, all leveraged to aim the swarm gaze toward harassing civil servants Musk disagrees with.

what images are meant to look like.

Large language models lack what linguistics calls a referent.

Slop is a problem that can persist through strategic negligence: there is no need to prioritize a problem if that problem is helpful to the people tasked with repair.

Much of our digital lives occur within slop infrastructure. Slop merits deeper engagement because it is a by-product of the same information system it is now clogging up.

Though almost literally "autocratic," this AI-generated worldview is neither left nor right-wing, but a fusion of cyberlibertarianism and technocratic neoliberalism. Today it is a project with enough entry points to form its own agenda, priorities, myths and abstractions, rituals of inclusion and exclusion, and crucially, an invitation to enjoy its fantasy.

I don't see AI slop as disinformation, but about the reality that information of any kind, in enough quantities, becomes noise. It is, I argue, a symptom of information exhaustion, and an increased human dependency on algorithmic filters to sort the world on our behalf.

"low quality media, including writing and images, made using generative AI technology" used as "filler content that prioritizes speed and quantity over substance and quality."

posting jarring AI content to lure engagement

Shrimp Jesus

attempting a certain productivity to do with the dismantling limits of the body

On an internet without hyperlinks, where every post must be completely digestible in someone’s feed within microseconds of a user seeing it, your face, your physical body, is the last thing left that can connect across platforms. And creators like Cho have figured out that that’s one of the last reliable ways to keep their personas consistent across every platform they have to post on. It just so happens to turn out that the only impulse strong enough to still reliably motivate someone to figure out how to find your website is horniness.

And because it’s not just porn that’s going through this transition from top-down platform to bottom-up creator, it also means that a lot of viral content is beginning to feel a little porny.

this breakdown between porn world and not-porn world is having strange side effects on culture.

It was bas relief. It wasn't completely in the round, but you could feel the scratchiness of the clothing. You could feel the roundness of the pearls. And so, in that regard, it was a lifelike three-dimensional model of a two-dimensional representation. Is this the way to go? Because, we could do 3D prints of everything in the collection.

A very interesting example of just this issue was raised when they had the Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum, and they brought together numerous relics and the beautiful reliquaries within which they were set, and icons from Byzantium and elsewhere in the eastern parts of Europe and put them on display. Now, the visitors included people of the Eastern Orthodox faith, and, in that faith, the proper way in which to venerate an icon is to kneel before it, to pray before it and to kiss it.Now, was the British Museum going to allow visitors to kiss this exhibition, the items in this exhibition? Or actually, shouldn't the British Museum have obliged everyone to do so? Merely viewing such icons from a distance and not engaging in that sensory interaction with them would be to defeat their sensory presence, their way of being in the world. And so, I would love to see more experimentation with historically appropriate manners of viewing.

there's this phenomenal bureaucratization of the senses that goes on in the way, in which, for example, you go to an art gallery or a museum to see, to a concert hall in order to listen, to a restaurant to taste or to dine, and to a gym to exercise.

a lot of these objects were not meant to be put in a museum. A lot of them were in people's homes, in their cabinet of curiosities, or in the place where only men would be able to gaze at them, or in churches or in other different formats. And then now that they're in a museum setting with general visitors, what is the museum's responsibility in how we are talking about this, how we're choosing to display them, how we're choosing to talk about them in the labels, in the catalogs, in the exhibitions? Because all of that is adding to the art historical knowledge.

I think so many things draw me to museums. And I think it depends on, we have multiple identities, right?

The question of whether I link to one of my old posts or not isn’t answered by whether they’re related, but by whether the act of linking serves a purpose.