The future is digital… only it’s not what you think!
Titled off an earlier The Future of Maps is ‘squishy’, this follows 2017 The robots aren’t coming… they’re here!, and 2023 follow-on is AI isn’t coming… it’s here!.
Update: see ongoing items added to this evolving hot topic as Addenda below…
Update 2: posted here, here, and here dream.ai auto-generated “art” off a mobile app ‘trained’ on expressions (titles), filters & pictures… but is it art?
Update 3: deep fakes are scarily easy to produse, so much as that Jonathan Tracey who posted drone videos of Cambridgeshire developments (YouTube), created a short clip just to prove how easy it was to make, explanations under description.
(also shown here is how easy it was not only to create AI “art” atop with dream.ai here, but also lipsync videos using the companion wombo.ai here)
A post 5 years ago in my other channel enthused The robots aren’t coming… they’re here! picturing below a vid-con system, recently popularised by Zoom calls, mounted on wheels to present a speaker across the world on a conference stage. Now they didn’t put on a costume, but the anthropomorphism is undeniable… and that post went on to talk about tele presence to point out that robots aren’t necessarily what we think of.
Let me pursue this a little further. Ever since Isaac Asimov and right up to current news, we’ve been anthropomorphising robots: we basically create them in our image — are we Gods creating a new world in our image as in the Bible? — and of course the most famous examples are Boston Dynamics creating robot soldiers and dogs, incl. [t]his $2,700 robot dog [that] will carry a single bottle of water for you… talk about a solution looking for a problem!
My argument is that anthropomorphising robots — and amplifying them on the big screen — is just another form of misdirection: let’s fascinate the crowds — indeed instil in them a fear of the Rise of the Machines (see Addendum 2) — while we develop technologies that may or may not be useful to humans…
Previously on this topic I depict tech gone rogue on an electronic frontier both guvs and the law have difficulty corralling in. Now let me look at the topic of digital art, brought to my attention by my friend Marianne Magnin… who specialises in digitally tagging art against digital fraud! A former professional colleague started digital music composition via Animoog a decade or so ago. I also thank a Quaker sub-group in Cambridge — photographers, street art sketchers and printmakers — who are definitely on the analog end of the spectrum. And I myself am a story map maker weaving digital maps into stories, some of which end up being accidentally like so:
This map is based on real digital terrain data, but its look happened by autocorrecting it in a photo editor to improve its quality [2]: the result in no way depicts reality — see it in Google Maps — but it highlights stream networks and mountain ranges we’re intersted in, with main cities, countries, borders and coastlines for reference. In addition, data sources and processing steps are documented all the way.
Fast forward to artificial intelligence driven digital content creation: the rise of big data — mountains of information gathered by all sorts of devices in space and time to be stored and processed thru equally powerful computers and networks incl. the internet of things — coupled with increasingly accessible processing apps from desktop to mobiles, make it eminently easy to create something out of nothing. By that I mean, find some data and massage it without any professional know-how, in order to create interesting results. The banner picture is a series I created in a free AI picture generator on my old Android phone: I’m a geologist and a map maker and therefore have a good eye and some technical talent… but none of that was used: I simply typed in words of interest, picked a few filters and waited a few seconds to generate reams of pictures or which I only kept a handful. My ex was a potter and is a painter, so I know the talent and work involved in creating art… but this completely up-ends that!
The same way as internet practices up-end capitalist processes described previously —to recap: time, goods & services used to be traded, now these are freely given online and re-used for profit with scant control by overwhelmed guvs & laws—the internet will up-end artists. The much-vaunted disruptor effect— that gives rise to opportunities and failures, according to Google X mantra “fail often and fail quickly”— will affect mega corporations like GAFA: but they have significant capital and economic cushion, which artists by-and-large most definitely don’t [3]! The BBC “canary in a coal mine” article illustrates how copyrights are infringed upon by AI attempting to reproduce water marks:
This illustrates on reason I did a hard reset on my life and quit social media, to recalibrate my spiritual values and re-acknowledge and embrace my humanity.
Addendum 1: first comes an interesting interview of the challenges and benefits of AI from an artist’s perspective. Talk about “an abstract in a title” [4], images_ai on artistic freedom, why artists shouldn’t fear AI and how we can use open source tools to counter big tech is also a case study on using social media: of Twitter they say “On a personal level, it hasn’t changed a whole lot. I take commissions whenever they come in, although they’re few and far between. In real life, the account is mostly just a personal novelty to my friends and family” — that was in fact my experience on Twitter too and partly why I quit — but read on for a broad ranging view on challenges & opportunities.
Addendum 2: this blog on the other hand doesn’t sit on the fence — yet another long title Artmageddon [5]: The rise of the machines, and banning machine-generated images — it clearly demarcates original work from generated work, which Purpleport.com media outlet categorically accepts and rejects, respectively — they also posted a few AI-driven examples just like I did above — again read on for a detailed perspective from a key social media industry player.
Addendum 3: Ars Technica has an excellent discussion on the pros & cons in: Fearing copyright issues, Getty Images bans AI-generated artwork… and sure enough: Artist receives first known US copyright registration for latent diffusion AI art! Don’t you love their respective taglines: Getty out of here and So it is possible … as well as more “abstracts in a title”?
Addendum 4: note this scary development from restofworld.com: AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community:
“Stability AI is open-source, which means that, unlike Dall-E, engineers can train the model on any image data set to churn out almost any style of art they desire — no beta invite or subscription needed. 5you, for instance, pulled Jung Gi’s illustrations from Google Images without permission from the artist or publishers, which he then fed into Stable Diffusion’s service.”
This goes righ back to the second last paragraph relating to internet ethics discussed here before.
Addendum 5: See also in the Guardian: A deepfake video of Joe Biden singing the children’s song Baby Shark isn’t funny — it is deeply worrying.
1: not every reader is internet-savvy — I’ve had questions about ‘unreachable resources’ — see the French term “illectronique” = ‘illetré’ + ‘électronique’ or digitally illiterate. I volunteered before COVID in the next village west of Cambridge UK, a Monday morning group teaching computers to pensioners: they were more often than not given gear by well-meaning relatives — especially at Christmas — who didn’t realise that computers don’t run themselves
2: as in digital photography for example, it’s a common step to remove ‘haze’ in photos taken under sub-optimal lighting conditions
3: For disclosure, I left my first wife on friendly terms, simply because we couldn’t triangulate work incl. art, income and lifestyle
4: my thesis paper was likewise titled Regional cross section of the Southern Province adjacent to Lake Huron, Ontario: implications for the tectonic significance of the Murray Fault Zone… its URL is even longer!
5: with afore-mentioned Marianne Magnin in French, I coined “informARTique” = arts +/- informatique, not unlike “illectronique” in [1]?
