Via Andrew Curry’s ever-reliable Just Two Things newsletter—where does he find the time?!—here’s Annie Dorsen on AI “art” at [checks notes]… ah, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists?

When people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu “creativity” of big tech platforms, on a mass scale, we are facing a particularly dire form of immiseration.

By immiseration, I’m thinking of the late philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s coinage, “symbolic misery”—the disaffection produced by a life that has been packaged for, and sold to, us by commercial superpowers. When industrial technology is applied to aesthetics, “conditioning,” as Stiegler writes, “substitutes for experience.” That’s bad not just because of the dulling sameness of a world of infinite but meaningless variety (in shades of teal and orange). It’s bad because a person who lives in the malaise of symbolic misery is, like political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s lonely subject who has forgotten how to think, incapable of forming an inner life. Loneliness, Arendt writes, feels like “not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” Art should be a bulwark against that loneliness, nourishing and cultivating our connections to each other and to ourselves—both for those who experience it and those who make it.

In truth, I’ve largely shrugged off the AI art malarky over the last year or so, partly because it seemed (like NFTs) to be a species of brainworms endemic to the pandemic period which would diminish in perceived importance over time, but partly because I find the “art” itself much less interesting than the early DeepDream stuff, which at least seemed to have something interesting (if incoherent and ultimately a bit banal) to say about the collision-space of perception, altered states, technology and semiotics.

As Dorsen notes, these algorithms function more like a catalogue or a search engine (or a slot machine, in Dorsen’s own metaphor) of possible permutations, through which the styles of heretofore human artists can be accessed without any need to pay them; another act of digital enclosure perpetuated by the usual suspects, in other words. But while seeing what happened to writers during the Noughties now happening to artists is pretty bleak, it’s that symbolic misery that she borrows from Stiegler that really pushes my buttons, because it has existed for some time, albeit perhaps not in the accelerated form it’s now manifesting.

It’s what Stiegler calls symbolic misery that makes it impossible for me to even begin to engage with, say, K-pop, whose upfront artificiality and glossy perfection seems to me to rhyme strongly with the slot-machine art of these ironically-named server-farms and softwares (and also conceals a fundamentally exploitative mode of production behind its facade). There is something grotesque and repulsive (to me, at any rate) about their optimality, an unctuousness which is less about the “product” itself (though it can be seen there, too) and more about the manner—the systemicity—of its provision: frictionless and unquestioning, an infinite all-you-can-eat conveyor of iterated entertainments which can always deliver faster than you can consume, bigger better brighter faster more.

This is not, to be clear, a judgement on people enjoying AI art or K-pop or whatever else; nor is it a judgement of my own taste as intrinsically superior or ethical. Rather, it is a judgement on the systemicity that not only produces those entertainment forms, but also conditions the attenuated yet insatiable and risk-averse desire which such forms seem so adept at feeding and sustaining simultaneously—a systemicity which also attends the production of most of the things I like, too, albeit perhaps in an as-yet less optimised and incompletely captured way.

Click, click, click. Which button do we press to get out of the Skinner box?