AI art has no anti-cooption immune system

🌈 Abstract

The article discusses the importance of ugliness, transgressiveness, and shock in counterculture and how they represent an attempt to keep the world out of one's demimonde, especially from enthusiastic marketers who want to co-opt and commodify it. It explores how the rise of AI art and generative systems threatens to strip away the personality and authenticity of creative work, making it feel "soulless" and indistinguishable from corporate design.

🙋 Q&A

[01] Myspace and the Democratization of Design

1. What was significant about the ugliness of Myspace pages?

• Myspace's ugliness was an "anti-cooption force-field" that prevented corporate designers and art-directors from easily co-opting the platform's aesthetic.
• The ugliness of Myspace pages was exciting in a "outsider/folk-art way" and allowed authentic community members to be easily distinguished from parasitic commercializers.

2. How did Myspace's ugliness relate to previous "design democratization" movements?

• Myspace's ugliness was the heir to successive generations of "design democratization" that gave amateur communities, especially countercultural ones, a space to operate where authentic members could be distinguished.
• The early web, desktop publishing, and the proliferation of tools like the "img tag, imagemaps, the blink tag, animated GIFs" allowed for the expression of individual personality in web design.

3. What was the significance of this "low weirdness" in design and culture?

• Without this zone of "noncommercial, antiestablishment, communitarian low weirdness", design and culture would stagnate.
• Communities, especially countercultural ones, are where society's creative ferment starts, even if the designers later get co-opted by commercial interests.

[02] The Recommodification of Pop Culture

1. What is the author's concern about the recommodification of pop culture?

• The author worries about the "instantaneous co-opting of pop culture" and the loss of the "biodiversity of pop culture", which is "really, really in danger."
• The author observes that each new counterculture tendency gets absorbed by commercial culture faster and faster, using the examples of The Monkees, punk fashion, and the Seattle grunge scene.

2. How does the author view the role of ugliness, transgressiveness, and shock in counterculture?

• Ugliness, transgressiveness and shock represent an "incoherent, grasping attempt to keep the world out of your demimonde" from both "normies and squares" and "enthusiastic marketers who want to figure out how to sell stuff to you."
• The author sees 4chan's shock culture and anonymity as an attempt to create a "difficult-to-digest, thoroughly spiky morsel that resisted recommodification (for a while)."

[03] The Eeriness of AI Art

1. How does the author define the "eeriness" of AI art?

• The author quotes Mark Fisher's definition of "eeriness" as "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something."
• AI art is eerie because it produces the "seeming of intent, without any intender" - it creates the appearance of personality without an actual human mind behind it.

2. What is the difference between "authentic" counterculture work and corporate/AI-generated art?

• In "authentic" counterculture work, the personality of the human creator shines through, allowing the viewer to connect with a real mind.
• Corporate and AI-generated art is "soulless" because it aims to dress up the artificial entity of the corporation in the stolen skins of human creativity, without any true intender or personality behind it.

3. How does the author view the implications of AI art and generative systems?

• The author sees AI art as "born coopted" - even transgressive or immoral AI-generated content feels no different from officially produced corporate art.
• An artform that cannot be transgressive is "sterile, stillborn, a dead end" and cannot generate the "turnover that aerates the aesthetic soil."