You are welcome to the Museum of the Future
Short Talks on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff: How to Avoid Boredom Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) Image Generation
In 1992, the poet Anne Carson published a little book called Short Talks. It is a series of short essays, ranging from a sentence to a paragraph, on subjects that are seemingly disconnected. Her “Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff” is what it sounds like. Her talk was about the types of trout that appeared in haiku. In what passes for the book’s introduction, Carson writes, with dry Canadian relatability, “I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is a gargantuan job of a lifetime. Right about when she published that, the internet started to take off.
Fast-forward 30 years and one of the latest ways to avoid boredom, at least for me, is to stay up late and goof around with AI image generation. Tools such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion can be instructed, with textual prompts, to produce ersatz oil paintings of dogs in hats in the style of Titian, or simulated photos of plasticine models of astronauts riding horses. Stable Diffusion is an open source project and it was fun when I first started playing with it. I went back to see how they were. I quickly realized that the resemblance had something to do with form.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/artists-do-not-fear-ai-image-generators/
Idiot World-Brains. How to Make Image Generation Work for a Little Lecture and an Artistic Manifold
Everyone says content is king, but the secret monarch of the content economy is form—constraints, rules, minima and maxima. You grow up learning form. The essay in high school is five paragraphs. The half hour for ads has eight minutes for sitcoms. Novels are long. The total number of characters in a tweeting is capped at 280.
What differentiates my tweet or essay or studio film from yours? We all make our choices within the form. Our style is spelled in a word. Carson’s book takes a familiar form, the little lecture, and subverts it, manipulates it, until as the reader you start to feel like you’re inside her wonderful brain, scrolling through her mental browser history, joining her in hyperlinked fancies and half-abandoned rabbit holes. If you want to make image generation like that, you have to make it with a giant idiot world-brain. (A less neurological way to put it: vast numbers of data objects grouped in layers, connected together to an incomprehensible degree, like string-and-nail wall art of a many-masted clipper ship but on fire with the flow of data.)
The people will have more power once they use the new tools. The people who were great at the old tools (paintbrushes, cameras, Adobe Illustrator) will be thanked for their service and rendered into Soylent.
Source: https://www.wired.com/story/artists-do-not-fear-ai-image-generators/
How to Make Maps with Intelligent Machines: Making Maps by Absorbing Images from the Internet, Adding Noise, and Improving the Simplicity of Inappropriateness
Humans like using machines to help them, and they also like to make better maps. A lot of people are affected by the generators. It is possible to spider images from across the internet, absorb the visual culture contained within them by scanning their caption, then add fizzy visual noise to them until they look static. To make a new image, the AI starts with a caption and some static, then runs the process backward, removing noise until an image appears that lines up with the caption, more or less. (It’s bad at drawing hands, but so am I.)
This feels gross. It feels gross to see artists databased into oblivion. Someone could tell a computer that they want a portrait of Alex Jones in the style of Frida Kahlo and it would take care of the rest. These systems roll scenes, territories, cultures—things people thought of as “theirs,” “their living,” and “their craft”—into a 4-gigabyte, open source tarball that you can download onto a Mac in order to make a baseball-playing penguin in the style of Hayao Miyazaki. The new tools will give people new power. The people who were good at the old tools will be thanked and their service rendered into Soylent. It is as though a guy wearing Allbirds stumbled into a neighborhood where everyone is barely holding on and says, “I love this place, it’s so quirky!” Siri, play my Quirky playlist. There is a blue bottle on the corner.
There is art from Matrix: Resurrections, a set designer on the movie who helped plan the museum’s layout, and a robotic arm holding a pen that writes notes in a conversation with Slavoj iek.
Kim says that it’s weird, but it makes her happy that people are interested. As we talk, we see people look at the gallery space with a sign stating sorry for killing most of humanity on one wall.
The upstairs includes an interactive play on Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” from the Sistine Chapel and an installation that uses computer vision from Google to describe people and objects in front of a camera.
A quote from Dante above the entrance of the lower section of the museum is what Kim says is the gates-to-hell selfie spot. The museum is also home to a deepfake of Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking from a script generated by ChatGPT, a statue of two people embracing made from 15,000 paper clips that’s meant to be an allegory about AI safety, and robots flown in from Vienna made from Spam tins with little arms that type.
