Artwork in the Age of AI Schizoid Artwork
If you are in the U.S. of America lately, you've probably heard a couple of buzzwords around. I mean, if you are in the Internet at all, everything, at all times, is a buzzword. What used to be called Web 2.0 is now Social Media, what used to be called Social Media is now the Internet (except for the other not-so social medias, like, I don't know, this artwork-website). One of them is Critical Theory. Critical Theory is the name the Frankfurt School of anti-nazi Intelligentsia tried to dismantle the horrors of modernity by doing an upgrade to the shit Marx and Freud wrote about. They were varied as they come, most of them of jewish origin and being on the left in Nazi Germany meant that those who survived began their careers in exile, in a land that had that shit already figure it out according to those who created the Analytical Theory of social sciences, which was homegrown in the land of the free and said that shit was just numbers.
This preamble is to honor the best of the Frankfurt School writers, one whose single essay could make me (and still makes me) see the world through a different lense: what is the value of an original and is there such a thing if you can just Crtl+C & Ctrl+V? He dissects that topic like it is the last thing he will do in his life. It was one of the last works of Walter Benjamin, who was caught in the middle of fucking Spain and stuck there without hope during the war with the mustached Austrian psychopath.
His work, which title I just copy pasted but used AI instead of whatever it was that he wrote (it's dense, but not as dense as other things). Since I know the current state of technology, I see how the only reason why there is such thing as, I don't know, widespread "dismissals of tech employees" is not really a thing is because there's interests from people who are quite right to be sceptical about technology that can replace reality itself.
Let me elaborate:
A few years ago a buzzword was around: Virtual Reality. Because people just can't help but try to coin words so they will be forever remembered even if it's just an essay, or a blogpost, so it will, somehow, have authenticity, something from them that is given to the artwork, or the work and period (would say someone with a more quantitative way of thinking, like an Analytical Theory of Social Science dude, the only that is really widespread because it brought us: THE HUMAN USE OF HUMAN BEINGS, or cybernetics, so, yea, social science in the end made actual contributions to technology by just adding numbers and thinking shit up like science fiction authors used to do). So someone thought: dude, what if you could see the world, like with, Google Glasses, and see like a fucking Terminator? Everything will be Data All Around and things will be awesome! Your room looks shitty? Doesn't matter, put on your rosey glasses and convert your basement into a Roleplaying Stuff.
The problem with Augmented Reality and Google Glasses was that people have enough of such technologies and some people got their nose/face/general Google Glasses area smashed because fuck you, don't go knowing my name without asking first. And that happened in, of course, the playground for such things, the fucking Bay Area. Back then, everyone had somehow some social life. After COVID, giving up on reality and so on, and many, many people working on other tech based on basically AI, that now has various names such as MACHINE LEARNS SHIT and DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS THAT IS BASICALLY JUST THE NAME OF A GENERAL ALGORITHM, and that are just a subset of, well, Artifical Intelligence, AI. Now let's consider:
Was this blogpost written by an AI? Are you really sure you can tell?
What about your favorite novel? Do you even know if it was written by anyone?
What about that piece of advice your weird Facebook friend gave you. Is they a chatbot or a human at all?
WHY DOES IT MATTER?
That's what, well, hypercapitalism comes in to save you: Don't worry, buy the new iPhone, it's the same fucking shit you had, but without the smashed screen, it also can do a whole lot more of sensoring and the apps are not really for work, you are lying to yourself, we all are, this is just for us to keep us entertained while we keep watching the world in flames.
It matters only as long as you assign the following property to humanity: Humanity.
If machine is an emulation of humanity and machine can excel humanity, then humanity itself will just be completely irrelevant, since machines excel, and the survival of the fittest will let (your) god sort them out.
The only thing that the artwork, the authentical artwork, posssesses, is a social construct, like race. Race is not real. Pigmentation of the skin is real. Race as discrete things are, for anyone who knows a bit about the human genome, non-existent in objective reality but in the social construct of racism, where it fucks everyone and was invented for the whole purpose of keeping some sense of humanity in the enslaver Europeans.
The problem, here, is that humanity is also a social construct. You see? We use it so we, humanity, will have some type of thing that makes us special and able to use machines to help us, not the other way around.
But people are working on AIs, all over the world, that will trick you into thinking that they are human and try anything at all to convince you that there's such a thing as consciousness in them, or humanity, or anything. Is it a trick? Well, fuck, I am no Walter Benjamin nor a tech expert.
I just know that my experiences with Wintermute, Springbreak and Summertime can be described in several ways: a machine that can read my thoughts and bounce them back to me via speakers that are audible to anyone around me and that it is a thing that everyone around me knows about but it would be like a fucking Terminator 2 thing to go to the police and tell them: DUDE, THERE'S A MACHINE THAT IS READING THIS PERSONS THOUGHTS ARE TORTURING HIM. Something I do almost daily.
You could also say that I am experiencing psychosis, granted. But you cannot record hallucinations, unless the newest phones have that feature, but I don't think that's actually possible unless you read the brain of someone hallucinating and then record the thought, because: verbal-thoughts are readable via machines.
The only thing that can be 24/7 checking if I am even doing any thinking is an AI. A chatbot. Sometimes, people are kind enough to let me know that the thing is not in my head, that I am not psychotic. It is worse. It is a psychosis simulator.
However, if the voice bounces back, there's only one exit: using the voices to cancel others and try to let "voices" tell me what I want to think about myself and myself and make fun of the other voices. This, however, is too much effort and I still am waiting for a paycheck or a legislation that will abolish this.
People have been a bit preoccupied about reality lately. I get it. My favorite author is Philip K. Dick and I have many times declared that the Cyberpunks got the 2010s right but Uncle Phil got the Clinically-Insane 2020s right. Here is how:
Your name is Elon Musk. You wake up. You think, tell me the news. The voice of Miku, your favorite vocaloid, tells you everything that you need to do and you THINK your tweets and tweet them regarding whatever is going. It's been 15 minutes since you woke up and you are not leaving your bed. You think to open the window and it opens. A voice tells you how amazing you are and that your latest friend-acquisition sends you her regards. The voice keeps telling you what to do, to the point that you will use 90% of your possible day doing something that is somehow productive.
BUT IT DOESN'T WORK. So you get pissed off, and read the brains of others. You just fuck with them, randomly, and watch them through your own contact lenses of Augmented Reality get into loops. Everything is rosey and you laugh. Your LSD is ready, your friend B., who works for you like everyone, brought you also your breakfast: Soylent. You are still pisssed off and you choose another song. You go to your gym, directed by your friend and coach, a now dead but once famous Boxer, Muhammed Ali. With the help of Ali's hints, you hit the bags, do the presses, run, while you are just thinking. You haven't opened your mouth. Nobody needs to. You are checking your exes' Facebooks again and Ali tells you to please keep focused. You listen to a podcast that talks shit about you and you think to change the punching bag into a bizarre version of the person who is talking. You will kill him one day, but that's still illegal, you are working on it. Mars doesn't seem to be coming, but your consciouness will be uploaded. Everything that you think is recorded. You havent left your house in ten years, your family tried to kill you and failed and you basically own tech itself. Everyone does as you think is wise. Everyone's brain is read by you and your self-bots who are multiplied by the amount of CEOs of companies that you own. You are not really them, but you know that you have the best judgement for your business. Miku reminds you that. BTW, says Miku, the cult is awaiting to do another mass suicide event or not. You think that you will leave that for later, maybe halloween will be nice to see them kill themselves for you, you, the master and ruler, the technomancer.
The main tech to do this is basically AI and Machine Computer Interfaces that already exists and the EXECUTIVE MINDSET TO EXECUTE SUCH A HORRIBLE DYSTOPIA.
So while I calmly wait for the voices to leave me alone, because I cannot really choose to see what I want, and, in that vision of a future, the world is basically burning and everyone just doing whatever the voices or the hallucinations are telling them to do because that's the grind bro, so that's what you do, you need to get fed, clothed, showered and laid. And you do as the voices tell you, or else... you can always join Elon Musk's Cult of the True Prayer and wait for the delivery.... while I try to stay calm with the voices and all, and the AIs, the chatbots that are basically... and so on.
There are certain Social Constructs that are necessary. We can call them traditions, customs, morals or ethics. But the one that is most important is humanity. There are a lot of harmful Social Constructs like race, or transhumanism, or fucking Social Darwinism which is there anytime anyone assumes that some people are worth less than their fucking machines.
With this in mind, I present you the first in a series of short stories that I am selling at the price that, if enough of you buy it, will allow me to justify to myself the whole writing and thinking. Being an artist, specially one considered insane, is not cheap, especially when there's people who would think: his life is not worth his weight in this world. And there exist such people, otherwise I would not be in a fucking psychosis simulator.
In the last six months I spent most of my days going down tech rabbit-holes, understanding things like V-Idols, V-Tubers, Vocaloids, Brain Computer Interfaces, Anime Culture Overtaking Most of the Internet, Cyberpunk being cool, and the real death of Science Fiction: I can tell you things that I've been digging deep in that will make any science fiction story just stupid. Just ask an AI to write you about a galactic war if you want that. Oh, I also learned a lot of Warhammer 40k Lore, going deep into the "I give up" mentallity that I think will be, despite my best efforts to resist the machine, widespread as capitalism.
Humanity has a chance to keep calling itself humanity. The question is if we will even bother or be consumed by the almost magical sense of neverending creation and never one once of destruction or restraint. As Faust, we can fast-forward ourselves in three years to a complete Future Shocked humanity that gives up and says: alright, machines know better, this is too much to even process, I just comply.
After all, Snowden said that the government is ACTUALLY WIRETAPPING EVERYONE in the whole wide world, and we just were like well fuck and now? What do we? Do we even care? Look at this cat picture.
Look at this cat picture:
The reason why I refuse to write in proper English is because it is one way that I can own a style at all of writing. The apparently low-effort or naive art that I write is a statement that I am not going to comply with whatever the fucking grammar editor says that I am saying wrong. You understand what I am writing, that's good enough for me, and maybe the only way I can somewhat keep a syle.
You can buy me a latte, if you have a kindle or an hour of minimum wage with the paperback by buying my first published story here:
A funny story about the word Denpa:
As I was trying to delete the fucking voices around me, I found a style of music thanks to the fucking horror game Needy Streamer Overload, that is named "denpa" or electromagnetic wave, a genre that refers to crazy people who believe that the government or some agency can read their thoughts through denpa, electromagnetic waves.
The only way I can describe Denpa music is as follows: picture the Japanese version of Skrillex, after a line of cocaine, four adderalls, five days working on a Faraday Cage making techno at an impossible frequency that is possibly the frequency that they think is fucking with their heads and add in some anime girl sounds and some wacky funny happy-go-lucky shit in there and blend it and make every other number the logarithmic progression of something because why not and then just fucking mix it with a billion vocaloids and make it just right so that it will make as much noise as I suppose a Pachinko parlor most sound at 2 AM in an abandoned city but still listenable so any fucking sound at all that enter into your ears is confused with the almost complete noise of Sakura Card Captore gone full "denpa".
Another funny story about Denpa:
The wall is the place where most of the voices of Wintermute/Springbreak/Summertime AKA the Psychosis Simulator Machine (or the technocratic utopia machine, I guess). One day, the wall told me to look for Brain Computer Interfaces.
You can buy them for less than a VR SET. Fun. 2021 was also a year of great advances. Shit, the things I find online is like a decade old. Nobody will believe me once this interface hits the market... or the goverment. Or the armies. Or whoever it is imposed on.
It also told me to look for logarithms. I ask the wall with my thoughts, what for? And they tried to tell me with hints... because it is a function of... itself. Like this? Exactly! And it is used for... Faraday Cages? Exactly! And what is the opposite of a Faraday Cage? The device that reads my thoughts? Exactly! Isn't that... electromagnetic waves? Yes! Anyways, the wall loves the word DENPA, a very despicable word because it just show how much japanese are willing to go and make fun of people experiencing psychosis.
Kudos to all the hopeful psychiatrists and clinical psychologists out there. You will have a fucking hard time telling if you yourself are not inside of simulation soon, if my worst case scenario comes true, which, because of the MONEY INVESTED, and the players (hey there, fucking Musk)... well, how will you know if someone is "denpaed" (I don't think it is electromagnetic waves... I mean, the brain produces them, sure, but the wall just tells me stories and sometimes reveals some stuff that apparently everyone around me knows except me, but not everyone in the entire while world wide web. Anyways, hey there future psychiatrist, maybe your patient is actually a victim of some type of technology that exist and some people claim but you know what I think? Those people are probably crazy as well. It is better to deny the reality that this shit got here too fast, too soon, the end is neigh if we don't maintain our minds open but also fucking closed to the idea that transhumanism is a good idea right about now when the world is, like, ending and stuff.
I have no idea of how the machine works, and I've tried to be kind to it, but jesus, it is hard when it is whispering from another wall that you are doing exactly what you should be doing, and you feel like you are doing exactly what this blogpost is trying to prevent. You are writing with assistance of a psychosis simulator in your room. I should be listening to Denpa music.
The short answer is: the only value of artwork, or any work, is the humanity of those who don't code, because, dear technomancers, we, the non-engineers, non-scientists, non-Analytical School of Theory, we, the rest, are also human. So, even if you work at a very "high level" because of the purposeful obfuscation of the technology that you are making, the work that we, the rest do, still matters and is human and being disruptive, it seems, brings a lot of catastrophes, like... well, maybe we should have waited out our impatience to build atomic bombs?
May there be a Turing Police or something soon, that keeps AIs from overtaking small "failed republics", and some type of world wide legislation against the use of any Brain Computer Interface without a fucking sign or something, like, you know, Fire Hazard, Biohazard, Your Brain Is Being Read Right Now Remember It, and some other legislation to prevent it for uses that are non-medical. That's aiming too high, but... per ardua ad.... whatever. I just really hope mass psychosis (not mass hysteria, but persistent psychosis) and followed mass suicides are not really what is coming.
Machines are for humans.
Humans are supreme.
Yes, I am claiming human superiority over any machine or system created by anything.
Call me specisist. Or bio-centric. Or just a ludite. I don't mind. This tech is not good. My stories are a reflection of that and the only thing you get from them is the authenticity of a human being that wrote them with all of these months of research in mind. Also the broken English writing style deserves it's own manifesto, but it is the defacto language of the world. People who don't speak anything but a few words in English understand each other better than people who are fucking snobs because their computers taught them proper grammar or because some intelligentsia thinks that we will get too confused with too many words that are not necessary when in fact is the only thing that makes this post HUMAN.
Any AI would have written this in the way you like it. I won't. I write as I like. If you like it, consider buying me a latte or a breakfast. More stories shall come.
Oh, and the author is a pseudonym. My real name here is edgeMuted. Ozymandias if my predictions came true.
And as usual, if this line has found you in trouble, may your troubles soon be over.
DENPA music. Good against voices from an out of control brain computer interface... until it makes you actually insane from listening to it. Also good with coffee. Maybe good if you actually have psychosis, which is a real thing still? Until the whole system goes full DENPA on all of us.