The map is not the terrain.

With all the new updates this week, a reminder that LLMs are an excellent illustration of the attempted shifts to redefine what we usually call art (and knowledge/skill) to be almost entirely separate from its creation process and from its original meaning, context, environment and situation which lead to its creation. Being trained on digital reproductions of artworks and some select metadata, these models are fundamentally constrained to identify patterns for regenerating simulacra, their usage purely symbolic — a user-driven form of meme-style cultural sampling, pure semiotic “affiliation by association”, a kitschy clip-art-esque usage of looks, styles and aesthetics, entirely decoupled and devoid of history, meaning, context, incentives and other factors of (art) making/learning. A total lack of embodiment. Make this look like that. Baby portraits in Rembrandt's style, Ghibli used for PFPs or to create Neo-Nazi propaganda. Who cares?!

The great homogenizer.

Even for me as an artist primarily using non-LLM-based generative techniques for 25+ years, training a model on a corpus of my own works and then having it churn out new derivations, other than a case study, it would completely counter any of the creative & systemic investigations I'm after with most of my works. LLMs turn everything into a sampling and prompting workflow. Replicating a (non-existent) house style is the very thing I'm least interested in!

Triteness re-invented.

Removed from any original intentions of the consumed works enslaved in their training corpus, ignorant to the emotional states of their creators, free from the pains and joys and myriads of micro-decisions of art making, of the social context and the limitations (physical, material, skill) which led people to search for expressing their inner thoughts & feelings via artistic means... AI enthusiasts celebrate this new contextual freedom as creative breakthrough, but it’s always the same underlying sentiment behind: “The final original idea was that everything had already been done before.”

The Exascale mindset.

From the ravenous assembling of training datasets by ferociously crawling & harvesting absolutely anything which can be possibly found and accessed online, entirely disregarding author & privacy rights and social/technical contracts of acceptable use, the energy consumption for model training at a scale competing with developed nation states, to the abrasive social and political engineering and the artificial inflation of framing this tech as beneficial and inevitable to our societies. Most of the news & tech media, always hungry for clickbait, YouTubers able to create decades’ worth of new content — everyone happily lapping up any press-releases and amplifying the hype. Are there any responsible adults left where it currently matters most?

This ignorance-by-design isn’t about LLMs or their impact on art: The wider discussion is about how a tiny group of people with access to quasi-unlimited resources, capital and politicians is attempting to redefine what human culture is and to treat it (us) like just another large-scale mining operation, converting millennia of lived human experience, learning & suffering into monopolized resources for total extraction/monetization, filtered, curated, controlled and eventually sold back as de facto truth, with original provenance and meaning annihilated or vastly distorted to fit new purposes and shifting priorities/politics...

Don’t let the map become the terrain!

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Two quotes by Friedrich A. Kittler as related food for thought:

“What remains of people is what media can store and communicate.”

“Understanding media is an impossibility, because conversely, the prevailing communication techniques remote-control all understanding and create all of its illusions.”

#NoteToSelf #LLM #Art #Culture #Media #Quote