This is a response to Art in the Age of AI by Bret Schneider.

…like religious art which turned out to be nothing at all about religion, the long culture beginning with AI may not be about intelligence at all.

So what is “the long culture beginning with AI” “about” then? Schneider declares that this culture is not about “intelligence,” which he conflates with corporatized creativities bringing to market many reactive “tasteless” products. Rather, he seems to argue, as we debate art in the age of AI, we confront Aesthetics proper, that is, some ways in which subjective and sensori-emotional values interface with structural forms of value(s). Roughly compressing art, artifice, and artistry into an enormous zip file of cultural processings, Schneider’s text taunts at least three modes of aesthetic artifice/art/artistry, which I identify (using his vocabulary) as reflective genius, automation, and (de)contamination.

These modes are intertwined, but can be parsed somewhat distinctly:

1) With regards to reflective genius, in the absence of a divine judge or unified set of laws for goodness and rightness, AI promises an “objective” gaze that can reflect us back to ourselves “accurately” (or at least be presumed to be doing so, via suspension of disbelief and a blackboxing of the humxn technologic-cum-ideologic artistries that constructed the AI in the first place). If seen solely as hard material cognition, the AI’s reflection of our value(s) gives us a “pure” mirror that shows us as we are, providing aesthetically delicious narcissistic determinations (à la The Pattern or Co-Star, Netflix’s use of viewer data to develop screenplays, Refik Anadol’s work, such as Interconnected). Here, AI is assumed to be essentially rational; programs use our raw data, preferences, clicks, views, and reacts to understand desires for that program’s directions, developments, its deontic ‘shoulds,’ including aesthetics. This functionalist Aesthetic demand has its roots in naturalism, and, like naturalism, easily becomes a tool of state propaganda using “facts,” statistics, and other supposedly-objective analytic tech to manipulate and conscript reflections of selves into homogenizing representations.

2) Somewhat in opposition to the AI’s “smart” mathetic judgment is its promises of automated pleasure beyond humxn capabilities. AI’s potentially surprising syntheses and procedures (usually absurd, see the artybollocks artist statement generator, my own/PPL’s ASSESSMENTS) are “beautiful” (also “stupid”) because they seem childlike and infinite, combining words, frequencies, and other somatic “bits” far more numerous than any one artist can embody and thereby becoming “purely natural” (as if nature) beyond the biases, beliefs, and values of bounded subjects. Here, Aesthetics connects the pleasure-value of autonomic affect (like amusement) with post-ideological deanthropogenesis, clinging to the notion of art as an autopoetics that feeds on cultural taboos, titillations, and tastes and then (ideally) feeds back some orgiastic catharsis (or at least humor.) Via reinforcement of this paradigm, fetishization of those and that deemed “primitive” or “raw” (e.g. children, women, those culturally rooted outside of Northern-Western imperial blocs, artists, and perhaps AIs one day) remain deprived of analytic agency and reduced to consumables, laughables, outsiders to knowledge and reason.

3) Finally and most commonly, AI projects a “pure” form or process that can then be deliberately fought, corrupted, or contaminated. Unlike complex social systems, cultural conflicts, and paradoxes of political governance, AI offers a paper tiger, a mythological villain. Philosophically and theoretically, artistic projects are pitched to either expose the failures of AI, seeming to prove “excess” affect and spiritus “beyond” materialist and physicalist views, or to show — ah, bittersweet — that “the humxn spirit” is “nothing more” than physical amalgamation and accumulation, with the positive or negative proofs both engendering neo-idealisms and romanticisms, as well as some more dangerous behavioralisms-cum-social Darwinisms. Here, artists and engineers alike materialize fundamentalist categories for “authentic human being” in opposition to “artificial” (or “parasitic”) forms of being, thereby assigning themselves the authority to define humxnity within, as, and on their own beliefs, values, and conceptual hegemonies (see Bina48, Memories of Passersby I).

What these three modes of aesthetic artifice/art/artistry have in common is an ugly obsession with purity. This makes Schneider’s analogy about religion and art especially worth investigation. Further, this analogy suggests that the “long culture of AI” isn’t just beginning; our fears of and desires for robotic replacement, promethean subsumption, and total(itarian) cybernetic simulation are fully rooted in and emergent from Judeo-Christianity, capitalist totalitarianism, and ongoing embattlements between views of art as an organic or biocultural autonomos and views of art as an artificial (or “constructive”) tool of social control. //