Leave without me, I'm home

One of the things I love about AI is the cray

When we can see the mistakes an AI produces, we can see what the machine thought was going to be right.

(I know it doesn’t actually think, but in that it creates content based on predictions grounded in patterns that have been found within gigantic datasets, maybe these predictions mimic human thinking a tiny bit? Warning: my philosophy training was a really long time ago)

Anyway the point I’m making is that seeing what crack-adjacent visions the machines come up with is one of the joys of this technology. There’s a perpetual grand reveal when interacting with the algorithms that is powerfully conceptual for creativity, maybe something like defamiliarization.

I love the mystery, subliminal horror, and dumpster-fire-on Planet GalaxyFace weirdness of some of the outputs produced by the tools of today. I would really miss it if it started to get everything “right”.

Obviously the general discourse upon the widespread public release of these tools has been the observation that we can’t believe how much the machine gets right. And these technologies are incredible of course.

But:

What’s our vision here of how good the AIs should get, before we start to roll back the early excellence of interesting failures?

How should we be thinking (and what language should we use to talk about) the historical aspects of this cultural production? Like, how can we get back here if the technology advances to the point where there are no more “mistakes”?

Will we look back on these early days of creating with Generative AI tools as a kind of historical moment in radically and imperfectly desirable aesthetic outputs, maybe akin to glitch aesthetics or 8 Bit pixel art? 

Could this relentless stream of today’s top of the line crazy ever be rolled back to a certain moment, like a wayback machine that shows what the technologies were doing - or able to do -  at a certain time in history?

Do we have to decide now if we want an AI to retain a sense of innocent mistakes gone wild?

Leaving with a few AI classics: 

Sunspring (2016)| A Sci-Fi Short Film Starring Thomas Middleditch, by Ross Goodwin and Oscar Sharp.

The 2018 AI Olive Garden commercial by Keaton Patti: