Wednesday, October 4, 2023
I was recently reading about the design process of an album cover of a popular band in the mid-1980s. Apparently, since photoshop would not become available for a couple more years, the designers had to use an airbrush in order to give each member of the quartet the same homogenous “glow.” It wasn’t long after reading that article that I realized how “Artificial Intelligence” really should be categorized as “Airbrushed Intelligence,” since nothing A.I. can generate, on a creative level, has any character or substance. To say it lacks “duende” should be so obvious that it doesn’t need saying, but the whole point of modernity is that “all that is solid melts into air.”
“Airbrushed Intelligence” erases and manipulates. The only thing it can facilitate is the production of what Norman Klein calls in THE HISTORY OF FORGETTING the “social imaginary,” which will only become more alluring to the naive once it is linked up with VR headsets. Not all of us will succumb, however. My one brief experience with a VR headset made me realize that those who are not easily hypnotized find the images presented to be unbelievable. One of course recognizes what one is seeing, but it lacks credibility.
Unfortunately, even as we have just seen how a very tiny minority can disrupt the possibilities of political compromise in the House of Representatives, it will take only a very small number of people to become entangled with A.I.V.R. to completely destabilize the fragile equilibrium of our trust in each other. How can our rationales for agreeing on a shared set of presuppositions ever maintain any cohesiveness when they are subjected to an always already dilution of their rough-hewn entryways? A.I. wants only to suppress the material conditions from which our ideas emerge, and unless we demand an accounting that inordinately taxes that process, we will end up empty-handed, begging for another chance to attain some unmodified and unmodifiable identity.
About Bill Mohr