New Realities

Trip to the Communication Museum in Mitte to see the opening of the New Realities AI exhibition. The curators talked about how the exhibition came about and their motivation. I was very irritated by their decision to give the AI a name. AI systems are tools. They are run by companies who give their systems product names. Why not use those? Given the AI a human name suggests empathy which it does not have. The exhibits were created in two phases. The first showed people and objects in the rainforest. The second used a text AI to generate prompts for an image generating AI to imagine the workplace. Some problems to do with labour rights and stereotypes were acknowledged. They asked the AI to imagine an AI union (see extra). 

The pictures in the exhibition were very glossy full of young, beautiful people. The rainforest pictures were impressive: nice light and saturated colours. I enjoyed the surreal look of the objects placed into the natural settings. The people placed into the settings did nothing for me. 

I knew about the stereotypes amplified by the AI. Nevertheless I found it shocking to see. CEOs are all male in suits, cleaning staff are all female, many non-white. The workplace in the pictures are all very hip, the workers young and beautiful. In the end the pictures are all smooth. Clearly they are not real, but the world they come from is very much a Hollywood world. 

I think I was more disturbed by the AI generated texts than the images. The sentences are smooth but totally meaningless. In the same way that the images are devoid of meaning. I suspect that because text is an abstraction that needs to be decoded we notice the lack of content more than with images that are directly perceived by a primary sense. 

I really enjoyed the not quite right machines the AI generated. Apparently, it struggles with telephones with dials because the training material did not contain enough classic phones. The result is very surreal.

I found the AI generated digital worker union stuff perverse. Labour rights are fought for and won with blood. The AI tools belong to the capitalists who use them to deskill work and concentrate power. I learned that click worker is no longer an acceptable term because it is demeaning the work. They should be called digital workers instead. I reject that, it is a euphemism. All work is hard and takes skill. However, the AI machine takes away the skill of creating images, texts and any other creative output by utilising the work of many people who do not need to be skilled to analyse existing creative works. The AI owners extract the value. The process is the same as during the industrial revolution were the skillful weaver was replaced by machines and child labour to produce inferior cloth. 

The technology is not inherently bad. However, the way it is forced upon us by the tech giants without any conversation of how we want to use it and what for under which conditions is the problem. It is not inevitable and we can reject it.

The curators were asked whether they thought AI was a threat or chance. They both said it is a chance. Their answer comes from a position of privilege. Suggesting that the digital workers should just create a union to make working conditions better is rather naive. It disregards the hard struggle.

In the end, the exhibition was lacking. The curators showed off a new toy that produces shiny baubles. They touched on some of the issues although they totally neglected energy consumption and copyright issues. Maybe a critical investigation of the technology inevitably leads to the realisation that it is problematic tool.

This is now a rather long post and I still haven't said all that is on my mind. It was good to see the exhibition. Afterwards we went for a drink (difficult to find a place in Mitte) and had a lot of interesting discussions.

Update: expanded this post into blog post and fixed some errors