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Dis-automation: Creative Making with Automation and AI
Abstract
This essay considers the nature and stakes of creative making with computational automation technologies. I will argue that Bernard Stiegler’s organological approach to the human as “technical life” takes care of the question of the nature of creative making, and the pharmacological critical practice that it mandates takes care of the question of the stakes. I say “takes care” to emphasise that Stiegler’s theoretical enterprise is dedicated to a “therapeutics” of contemporary technocultural transformation, because culture is best understood as a taking care of the technical pharmakon – both poison and cure – that is our irreducible technical supplementarity. After providing an assessment of Stiegler’s thinking on organology and pharmacological critique, I will discuss the work of some creative makers I have worked with or was able to interview as part of the South West Creative Technologies Network’s Automation Fellowship programme in 2019-2020. The goal is to interpret their work pharmacologically and so to elaborate and extend Stiegler’s work on contemporary technocultural becoming. Digital automation and AI are powerful drivers of the so-called Silicon Valley era of disruptive “creative destruction”. This means that the stakes of creative making and its possibilities for taking care of the future cannot be higher today.
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I am Echoborg is promoted as 'a show created afresh each time by the audience in conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI)'. The show demonstrates how AI in a creative and performance context can raise questions about the technology's ethical use for persuasion and compliance, and how humans can reclaim agency. This audience study focuses on a consecutive three-night run in Bristol, UK in October 2019. The different outcomes of each show illustrate the unpredictability of audience interactions with conversational AI and how the collective dynamic of audience members shapes each performance. This study analyses (1) how I am Echoborg facilitates audience cocreation in a live performance context, (2) the show's capacity to provoke nuanced understandings of the potential for AI and (3) the ability for intelligent technology to facilitate social interaction and group collaboration. This audience study demonstrates how the show inspires debate beyond binary conclusions (i.e. AI as good or bad) and how audiences can understand potential creative uses of AI, including as a tool for cocreating entertainment with (not just for) them.
Faced with algorithmic governmentality
Algorithmic governmentality is characterized primarily by the following dual movement: a) abandoning all forms of “scale”, “benchmark”, or hierarchy, in favour of an immanent normativity evolving in real time, from which a “dual statistics” of the world emerges and which seems to do away with the old hierarchies devised by normal or average people; and b) avoiding all confrontation with individuals, whose opportunities for subjectification have become increasingly scarce.
This dual movement seems to be the fruit of contemporary statistics’ focus on relations. We seek to assess the extent to which these two aspects of the “algorithmic governmentality” thereby outlined, with its sole reliance on relations, could facilitate, first, processes of individuation through relations (Simondon) and, second, the emergence of new forms of life through the plane of immanence overtaking the plane of organization (Deleuze-Guattari). Through this comparison with the main contemporary philosophies of relations, it thus appears that thinking about the evolution and processes of individuation through relations necessarily pertains to the “disparate” – a heterogeneity of orders of magnitude, a multiplicity of regimes of existence – which algorithmic governmentality precisely incessantly suppresses by enclosing (digitized) reality on itself. Algorithmic governmentality tends rather to foreclose such emancipation perspectives by centring individuation processes on the subjective monad.
In addition to the recent proliferation of approaches, programs, and research centers devoted to ethical data and Artifiical Intelligence, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to directly address the political question. Ethics, while crucial, comprise only an indirect response to recent concerns about the political uses and misuses of data mining, AI, and automated processes. If we are concerned about the impact of digital media on democracy, it will be important to consider what it might mean to foster democratic arrangements for the collection and use of data, and for the institutions that perform these tasks. This essay considers what it might mean to supplement ethical concerns with political ones. It argues for the importance of considering the tensions between civic life and the wholesale commercialization of news, information, and entertainment platforms—and how these are exacerbated by the dominant economic model of data-driven hyper-customization.
How is it possible to think new thoughts? What is creativity and can science explain it?
When The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms was first published, Margaret A. Boden's bold and provocative exploration of creativity broke new ground. Boden uses examples such as jazz improvisation, chess, story writing, physics, and the music of Mozart, together with computing models from the field of artificial intelligence to uncover the nature of human creativity in the arts, science and everyday life.
The Second Edition of The Creative Mind has been updated to include recent developments in artificial intelligence, with a new preface, introduction and conclusion by the author. It is an essential work for anyone interested in the creativity of the human mind.
In my third and final lecture, I consider the conflict opposing Denis Diderot to Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, Count de Caylus, on the faculty of judging works. The contemporary critic Jean-Louis Jam has called this conflict “the quarrel of the amateur.” I examine how this conflict anticipates from the eighteenth century, but in a kind of reversal in advance, the ambiguous fate in which criticism decomposes into philistinism—and in which the cultivated philistine comes to be interested and circumspect, and to repeat, with a serious, portentous air, “This is interesting … this is interesting.” With Diderot and the Encyclopédie, the Amateur becomes a figure on which there weighs a suspicion that imposes itself first insofar as the amateur represents a privilege typical of the ancien régime. But it also weighs on the amatorat, the bourgeois class of amateurs, as we shall see with Roland Barthes, and precisely as this bourgeois class, as an amatorat that is both philistine and cultivated. As for us, the hermeneuts of the twenty-first century, all more or less philistinized perhaps, mystagogues, mystifiers, and mystified, no longer believing in either myths or their demystification, we know now that we have come to know a new, quite uncultivated philistinism, though believing itself quite cultivated, and rather worse than that of all those bourgeois: a philistinism proper to our own time, a “bobo” philistinism, getting its honey from the buzz.
Throughout the twentieth century, the development of technologies—of what Walter Benjamin calls “mechanical reproducibility”—led to a generalized regression of the psychomotive knowledges that were characteristic of art amateurs. This regression was made possible by a machinic turn of sensibility that led to a proletarianization of the amateur so that the latter, having lost his or her knowledges, became a cultural consumer. These questions confront us today in a time in which a second machinic turn of sensibility is taking place. This second turn is made possible by digital technologies, through which just about anyone can access technologies of captivation, postproduction, indexation, diffusion, and promotion—technologies that were, until now, industrial functions that were hegemonically controlled by what I have called the psychopower of marketing and the culture industries. This new machinic turn of sensibility—which is no longer analog but digital—leads to a renaissance of the figure of the amateur, that is to say, to a reconstitution of libidinal energy which, after being systematically canalized and rerouted by consumerist organization, ends up putting in place an economy of drives, that is to say, a libidinal diseconomy.
This paper demonstrates how to interact with a conversational agent that speaks through an actual human body face-to-face and in person (i.e., offscreen). This is made possible by the cyranoid method: a technique involving a human person speech shadowing for a remote third-party (i.e., receiving their words via a covert audio-relay apparatus and repeating them aloud in real-time). When a person shadows for an artificial conversational agent source, we call the resulting hybrid an “echoborg.” We report a study in which people encountered conversational agents either through a human shadower face-to-face or via a text interface under conditions where they assumed their interlocutor to be an actual person. Our results show that the perception of a conversational agent is dramatically altered when the agent is voiced by an actual, tangible person. We discuss the potential implications this methodology has for the development of conversational agents and general person perception research.
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