Category: Other Page 61 of 177

Some new small collections:

• Putin’s Body Doubles (archive)
• Trump Burning the American Flag (archive)
• Reagan Burning the American Flag (archive)
  • Tangent from Reagan Surrendering USA to Soviets

From a blog post by Bryan Alexander about the same synthography Ars Technica piece I responded to last night…

As with any storytelling project or information technology this art form should also elicit criticism, even hostility. Some will charge users for not making “real” art, since they’re relying on large language models instead of actually drawing images or taking photos themselves. (Cf the critiques of the electric guitar or DJing.) Others will critique the form for complicity with the owners of the technologies and their bad practices: training bots on the work of uncompensated artists, forcing viewers into certain platforms, perhaps arrogating ownership of the results, and so on. Another critique might stem from supporters of other art forms, seeing #AICinema as unfair or illegitimate competition along economic, aesthetic, and/or political grounds. Imagine what might occur when people start making provocative or explicitly political stories.

Anticipating criticism seems wise.

No comment about people making provocative or explicitly political stories. We don’t have to imagine any more. It’s no longer a what if. It’s a what.

This was an off-shoot to following links about synthography, an excellent short piece thinking about tools like Midjourney as “idea cameras.”

Pictures are powerful because they can be shared across time, space, and language barriers. Pictures allow you to travel back in time and see what someone else saw, at that moment, wherever they were.

Photography can capture moments that happened, but synthography is not bound by the limitations of reality. Synthography can capture moments that did not happen and moments that could never happen.

Taking a great photo is about being at the right place, at the right time, and pointing your camera at the right subject, in just the right way.

Taking a great syntho is about stimulating the imagination of the camera. Synthography doesn’t require you to be anywhere or anywhen in particular. The great synthographers will be great storytellers and great poets.

Agree with all of this!

Watching the shape that generative media is taking, it occurs to me that there is emerging a kind of sub-category of journalism which concerns itself with what happens in the unreal world. That is, invented images and entire worlds are becoming things of interest in their own right – not just in terms of a debunk or a fact-check, but because they are note-worthy and interesting in and of themselves.

To me, generative media and the latent space literally is the Metaverse. Like an early alpha version… Okay, maybe I can’t – yet – navigate the latent space using VR goggles and a directional control, but that day is surely coming. And in the meantime, I can use tools like Midjourney to reach into and explore realms which seem to have their own kind of existence and (hyper)reality — and I can bring back treasures from them to share with others, making those Otherworlds more real and accessible from this one.

I asked ChatGPT to explain Baudrillard’s concept of the precession of simulacra and it made it pretty accessible, so I’m reproducing here:

The “precession of simulacra” is a concept developed by French cultural theorist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard in his 1981 book “Simulacra and Simulation.” It refers to the process by which simulacra—copies or representations without an original—precede and determine the real, effectively reversing the traditional relationship between the original and the copy.

Baudrillard argues that, in postmodern society, the distinction between the real and the artificial has become blurred, resulting in the loss of the original or authentic. He describes three orders of simulacra that correspond to different historical periods:

1. First-order simulacra: In this stage, representations or copies attempt to accurately reflect the original. The copy is seen as inferior to the original, and there is a clear distinction between reality and representation.
2. Second-order simulacra: In this stage, copies are mass-produced and begin to distort or mask the original. The distinction between the real and the copy becomes blurred, and the copy is no longer seen as merely a reflection of the original.
3. Third-order simulacra: In this stage, the copy no longer has any reference to the original and is detached from reality. The simulacrum becomes its own reality and precedes the real, effectively replacing it. The concept of an “original” loses its meaning, as representations exist independently of any supposed reality.

The precession of simulacra, according to Baudrillard, suggests that the simulacra are not just copies or reflections of reality; they actively shape and create reality itself. Baudrillard uses this concept to critique the hyperreal nature of contemporary society, where signs, symbols, and images increasingly dominate and mediate our perception of reality.

The idea of the precession of simulacra has been influential in cultural theory, media studies, and philosophy. It has also been used to analyze various aspects of contemporary culture, including consumerism, media, advertising, and technology. Baudrillard’s work has been both celebrated and criticized for its provocative and sometimes enigmatic exploration of the nature of reality and representation in a postmodern world.

I think the thing I was reaching for from the last post is in these terms probably the “third-order simulacra” where there is no corresponding referrent object/event/etc in actual reality…

Wikipedia proposes a fourth stage (which ChatGPT doesn’t seem to agree with):

The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers’ lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, “hyperreal” terms.

I think these are interesting tools as concepts, but the truth is much more blended than any of these neat boxes.

The more I’ve gotten into especially Midjourney v5, but also AI-generated images in general, the less useful and relevant I think the term “deepfakes” is any more. To me, that term is forever tied to a sort of early alpha version of what we now know as generative AI that mostly has to do with things like face-swapping in digital images and video. I just don’t find it terribly descriptive anymore for the current wave of uses that goes well beyond that.

Likewise, I never liked the even more vanilla term adopted by some quarters of industry, “synthetic media.” I get that it goes to a wider range of provenance and use cases than deepfakes, and cuts out the judgemental part of that older terminology. But I just never vibed with it.

“Generative AI” I like in general to describe the field. I plugged the 40 item request idea from Simon Willison and landed instead on the term “generative media” to describe inclusively, text, audio, video, images created by generative AI models. “Synthetic” still feels somewhat negative/judgemental to me, but I feel the word generative has positive implications: something is being generated, created, etc.

Likewise, I asked ChatGPT for 40 names for a subcategory of generative media which attempts to depict real persons, places, events, but which have no correspondence to actual things that took place in “real life.”

I’m still wrapping my head around the theory of it according to the semioticians, but it seems like simulacrum kinda points toward this distinction:

French semiotician and social theoristJean Baudrillard argues in Simulacra and Simulation that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. According to Baudrillard, what the simulacrum copies either had no original or no longer has an original, since a simulacrum signifies something it is not, and therefore leaves the original unable to be located. Where Plato saw two types of representation—faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum)—Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever”.^[7] In Baudrillard’s concept, like Nietzsche’s, simulacra are perceived as negative, but another modern philosopher who addressed the topic, Gilles Deleuze, takes a different view, seeing simulacra as the avenue by which an accepted ideal or “privileged position” could be “challenged and overturned”.^[8]

All that is a little too heady and complicated for everyday use, however.

Some of the better terms ChatGPT came up with here were:

• Virtual likenesses
• Artificial renderings
• Digital fabrications
• Virtualized representations
• Computational depictions
• Synthetic reenactments
• Generated replicas
• Constructed portrayals
• Simulated scenarios
• Invented visuals
• Algorithmic simulations

There’s probably some combination of the above which would be appropriate, depending on the exact use case. Maybe “Simulated portrayal”? Will sit with these more, but am thinking in terms of what might make sense as a label for something like Trump & Hillary kissing.

Perhaps:

Generative media:: Simulated portrayal

I enjoyed Simon Willison’s appearance on the Changelog podcast to talk about LLMs. One of the best things I took away from it was when you ask ChatGPT/Claude/etc for a list of ideas, don’t just ask for 10 (which I often do). Instead, ask for 40 because the length of the list causes it to have to come up with more creative variations. This seems to check out in actual practice.