In her new book, in which she combines the socio-economic and economic criticism of generative artificial intelligence (sometimes called Gen AI) with the aesthetic and technical analysis of algorithmic images, the German video artist and essayist Hito Steyerl (1966), doctor of philosophy and professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, reconstructs – at different scales and approaches – something like a Rude Goldberg machine (the strange inventions of the fictional Professor Lucifer Gorgonzola). Butts are characterized by performing a simple task in a complicated way), only more demanding and less friendly. This global machinery that works with machine learning, extracts and accumulates data, creates probability patterns, multiplies cryptocurrencies, develops weapons, reproduces (or “renders”) any object from a 2D or 3D computer model, creates world models that allow prediction and simulation of the future, generates derivative and standardized images and videos, in a word that captures reals in a statistical cloud, accounting (for now) between 3% and 4% of the world’s Energy emits carbon dioxide and the exploitation of frontier workers, among other excesses.
In the fragmented era of TikTok, according to Steyerl, not only has the global village envisioned by Marshall McLuhan been lost (not counting the readers of the Gutenberg Galaxy), but also its fragile distribution into “cold” media – little information – and “hot” media – lots – so celebrated in the golden ’60s, as machine learning (ML) algorithms convert the hot “noise” into cool commands, further cooling what is already cold. This means that the more thorough the cooling, the more computing energy is required and the more toxic heat flows out of the system. Whereby, contrary to the cybernetic ideal, entropy or in other words thermodynamic disorder increases. Therefore, in the next and inevitable (techno-optimists are enthusiastic) stage of IAG – general artificial intelligence or artificial superintelligence – the trend would worsen in several ways: financial, political, military, technological, energy, ecological. Added to this, on the other hand, is the degeneration of digital machines (they forget the improbable over time), which consists in repeating the most probable events in a kind of loss.
Anyway, in Steyerl’s tokenized hell, the operative dance of pixels and data generated by AI and trained by naive network users, who in turn train other AI systems, etc. – until degenerative collapse – today composes data visualizations (more and less than images) according to moral and legal rules, norms of veracity and statistical averaging. Of course, this filter, fueled by prejudices and social myths, results in mediocre products, an “average picture”, a mediocrity according to the patterns and parameters of the digital market and internet garbage. This creates a stuck, paralyzed, floating aesthetic that revolves around recycled styles and shapes from the past without creating anything new.
Authoritarians don’t like that
The practice of professional and critical journalism is a mainstay of democracy. That is why it bothers those who believe that they are the owners of the truth.
Hot media.
Images in the age of heat
Author: Hito Steyerl
Genre: Essay
Other works by the author: Duty Free Art; The damned of the screen
Publisher: Black Box, $28,000
Translation: Maximilian Gonnet
About The Author
