The Machine Seems to Need a Ghost
At first there is random gaussian noise, a blank canvas on which neural networks pull pixels in statistical patterns.
The Machine Seems to Need a Ghost gallery: 40 selected images. Uncaptioned images form part of the visual sequence.
I.The Ghost in the Museum
The digitization of the analog destabilizes our knowledge of the “this was”, and we are afraid of this. But we were afraid of the analog, too: in the first photographs, we saw phantoms.
— Bernard Stiegler, 1995
Generative artificial intelligence can theoretically create any image, any combination of pixels selected from the latent space.
However, in practice, every tool is shaped by specific technical choices and is constrained by the finite dataset of visual culture we feed it. The latent space shrinks into a smaller curated slice of visual possibilities.
Generative images become a haunted museum, a spectral gallery. A cold machine curated by our own existing preconceived notions of art. Ghosts of past images linger in the datasets, influencing and pulling the noise towards a bygone visual world.
II.The Museum in the Machine
Generative images are being produced at an ever increasing rate. They are posted online, spreading across websites, blogs, social media, gradually becoming part of our visual culture.
Artificial intelligence tools will be trained on artificial images and soon be subsumed by a majority of their own creations. The feedback loop will repeat again and again the clichés of our visual world. Biases we created will amplify their influence, stereotypes will set deep roots until synthetic images will be unable to escape these forces.
We will continue to digitally industrialize our way of seeing the world, and slowly trap it in nostalgic representations of the past.
When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray.
— Ted Chiang, 2023
The virtualization of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever from opposing presence to its representation, “real time” to “deferred time,” effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-living, in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts.
— Jacques Derrida, 1993
Just because something is current doesn’t mean it is new.
— Mark Fisher, 2006
You know exactly what I think about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.
— Marcel Duchamp, 1922
Sadly, the future is no longer what it was.
— Leyland Kirby, 2009
III.The Machine in the Black Hole
As automation and industrialization take hold of every aspect of our lives, jobs are destroyed, climate change looms over an inescapable future, and culture proliferates in a ceaseless, self-referential cycle of nostalgia.
As the loop gets stronger, images swirl along the event horizon, gravitational ghosts attract the spectrums of potential pixels into a more and more dense and limited space. Synthetic images generated by artificial intelligence will cement all our clichés, biases and stereotypes in a single dense black hole.
But these new artificial intelligence tools are also agents of chaos. For AI, there is never a correct answer, only a probable one. And sometimes, through the improbable, a new path emerges. Randomness, hallucinations, errors — these perceived shortcomings of AI could also be a statistical emulation of humanity and creativity.
As a black hole absorbs all and engulfs light itself, structures loop around the collapsing star, matter stretches until atoms come apart, all is obliterated and travels past the event horizon.
However, beyond that, no one knows what might emerge on the other end.
The world will end. The only reason, for which it could last longer, is because it exists.
— Charles Baudelaire, 1867
