The Infinity Mirror Room of AI

The new AI Technologies are tremendously useful but I think we might be moving too fast and are too excited about using them, especially for writers who have a body of work and have released books. It's interesting to have AI analyze them and talk about them. When you first listen to them it's quite amazing, but there are many inaccuracies and they miss all the nuances that would be required for someone to understand the work fully.

As an experiment, I took one of these Deep Dive videos and took the transcript from that audio and had Merlin do another analysis of it, and there were many inaccuracies, and many "hallucinations". 

This is one I recently did which analyzed an excerpt from my book Dynaxiom which related to photography.

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These are my comments:

2006: This was an entry I made the day after 9/11 when I was looking at the photos of the New York skyline with the Twin Towers missing.  I was thinking that in that moment being reminded of yesterday would be too painful. But at the same time, people were replaying the grizzly images for weeks and months afterward and they were addicted to them, as one would be addicted to sugar or anything else. AI completely missed this context. It's ironic that it was talking about visual shortcuts, and that’s what these AI analyzes are: shortcuts, and they typically miss a lot of important details. This is why printed books are superior to digital texts that are proliferating on the internet. It's easy for people to comment on them, but less easy to make inaccurate comments on a book, because the book is the evidence. This entry also became a song. See: https://dynaxiom.blogspot.com/2020/11/2006.html


1791: What I meant was that it's an easy way to say, “This is beautiful” through the act of taking a photo, as if the metadata automatically has the word “beauty” in it, or when you post it, it is tagged with #beauty.

1779: Talk about being blind to minute details!

1742: It misspoke as “tilting” artworks, when I was referring to the titling of works. It's interesting how the voices have become so advanced that they do misspeak, and slur and stumble over words. Interesting aside: "Tilting at windmills" is an English idiom, originating from de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote, meaning to attack imaginary enemies or engage in a pointless, futile, or hopeless battle.”

[There's a section in this new book Hoodwinked, where the author makes the assertion, which I agree with, is that we should repeal Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and have social media companies moderate all the content. The effect of this will be that social media companies will be too burdened by that and might even cause them to go out of business, or retool as something else. We still have the general internet, and if people want to share things, as they did 25 years ago on a forum or a website, those things can still be done decentralized. If you want to share a photograph that you took or a painting that you made, you would just upload it to your website or a blog, and it would have no social media connection. People would have to run a Google search to find your site and then they can view your work. So it turns the internet back into a pull technology. Now it's a push technology all manipulated with algorithms that maximize profits at the expense of a functioning civil society.]

1535: Sometimes you might not know whether a particular photograph was originally black and white or if it was color. If you see a colorized photo, your assumption was that it was always in color, and the fact that you don't know is kind of a deception. Colorized photos have a bit more nostalgia in them because it makes you feel as if you were there. Eventually we moved on to color photography, which matches reality more accurately. But black and white photography, especially in the digital realm, is more interesting because we can manipulate the channels more, as can be done with Calculations in Photoshop.

1444: Tagging and organization is now easily done on a phone because it automatically files them for later retrieval. but you still have to have your own system so that you can have easy access to them in order to prepare a print, or otherwise use it in some kind of a context. Data, even though it's easily accessible, is  “trapped” on the phone as data. You can easily get your hands on it, but what then? Does it have a title? What size is the print? Beyond the iconic quality of a photograph, it can only get into a museum or gallery unless someone has this kind of role asking those kinds of questions. This can sometimes take hours or days to resolve. A photo on a phone can be uploaded to social media, but is still unresolved in these ways.

1379: Very often with snapshot photography you're not thinking of your particular style, it's only when you start editing the photo that you start to involve design, to make it more “me”, i.e., “That's something I typically like”.  You're not making those decisions when you're taking the photo. Although with apps now, I'll take a photograph because I want the look filtering will produce.

1325: As I recall, I think this was around the time where people were taking photographs of screens using Google Street View. The camera there is actually the LIDAR camera. This is essentially what was once called the New Aesthetic. Here’s one of mine:

 

1188. Smartphones are actually a very useful tool when you're in a museum. Very often if I want to remember something, I'll take a photo of it and the caption card. I see lots of people doing this, as opposed to taking a photo of the gallery and then sharing it on Instagram just to say that you were there. It goes back to how we use the smartphone as a tool. It's small enough to where you can do lots of different things with it, as opposed to carrying a laptop around in the museum. It must have been the case the hundred years ago where people would want to share where they were at the moment, but people weren't carrying huge cameras around.

1176: I couldn't remember what happened on July 18 2016, I think it was the Baton Rouge shooting. Usually I would use just the month and year but if something specific was happening I would use the actual date.

1096: It's interesting to think about the art of street photography when everything taken in a protest context is essentially street photography without the specific intent of it. Imagine Vivian Maier taking photographs at a protest with her Roloflex. Her images would look different even with the same subjects. What's interesting about her ironically is that she was always under a veil of privacy, because she thought that people did have privacy, even though she invaded it. Many of the images she took of people on the street shows that invasive quality with people being annoyed by them. Her protection of their privacy was through her never printing or showing the photographs. If she were living today, all those images would be on Instagram.

1063: Photography can  have a documentary quality which we presume is the truth. But once photography becomes an art it can have many interpretations and many truths,  or metaphorical truths, as it were. When you think about it, anything we produce that represents reality is a metaphorical truth. Art is all metaphor.

0932: This is happening now with AI, especially using this particular tool. The difference now is that there's a greater potential for over-manipulating reality. Just the act of having to go through these deep dive podcasts to fact check Is evidence of how things might go awry. I think they're amazing and are mostly accurate, but people aren't going to go through the trouble of editing, just as they don't edit photographs anymore. It's just immediately shared on social media and people will assume that it's true. No one is going to stop and think about it. If you want to be an artist, you're going to have to start doing that kind of thing. Making art is mostly an independent activity, but we now make art as a group.