Imagine a Clown in Paris - by Rick Morton
It is difficult, I think, to look at any image produced by so-called artificial intelligence and not immediately feel the desire to throw-up. I’m not the first to declare the over-saturated, shiny and vaudevillian output of generative artificial intelligence programs to be the common aesthetic of new fascism; indeed by now it is hard to escape the conclusion. Just take a look at all the posts.1
That some of the worst people on the planet adopted the ugly processing power of programs like Midjourney, DALL-E and the pathetically insistent Meta AI that keeps begging me to ask Meta AI to imagine anything — why does it sound like this is the pleading of a machine with a gun to its head — is hardly surprising. These dull minds, having long ago rejected genuine creativity, now turn to butchering it. Certainly, some of them became the richest men on the planet but even at the moment of conception where a Facebook was wrenched into the consciousness of its founders there was no act of creation, and definitely not in the life-giving artistic sense. The bro-tosphere chuckle fucks are not much in for creation; they take. Theirs are acts of deletion. Violation, at best. Not enough to turn their backs on art, they learned to dehydrate the essence of it on a drying rack, crush the remaining crystals and snort the lot just to achieve an ever diminishing euphoria from the same metric tonne of cultural vandalism. On it goes.
Art in the Age of AI
Getting a first or second place ribbon in capitalism is not commensurate with artisanship. It’s a pathology and should be treated as disqualifying. The generative AI program Midjourney bills itself as a way to make ‘art from art’ but they’re all the same. ChatGPT’s overlords have complained in public that they can’t make any money from their language extrusion machine if they have to pay actual artists and writers for their copyrighted work to train the thing. And apparently the bank deposits in the vault aren’t all mine? If AI ‘art’ is the aesthetic of neo-fascism then it is worth considering the common features. Chief among these, I think, is the brutal reassignment of the individual. Image generators are trained on hundreds of thousands of artworks and real images but what they produce is flattening. Nationalistic, almost. A generated image might have had thousands of inputs from real art but these can never be explicitly acknowledged, lest the empty achievement of the machine be thrown into question. Or creators ask for compensation2. Or both, probably.
The Impact of AI Technology
To command violent machinery to violent ends — ChatGPT, for instance, requires a bottle of water3 just to produce a 100-word email, other data centres use electricity to cool the extremely hot output of which generative AI represents some of the most intensive demands on these sprawling warehouses and all this while the chuds are using the grotesque simulacra of generative machine intelligence to produce agitprop that declares climate change is a hoax — is not exactly a new frontier for fascism, only now it is done with a kind of hyper-realistic glee. The far-right don’t care about the cost of their ideologies or their technology because they don’t have to bear them and, in the latter case, the global poly-crisis actually serves a purpose by creating the conditions where a charismatic authoritarian leader or his cronies can blame everyone else for the lacklustre state of the current nation and promise things will get better if only they can say mean things about queer people and women again.
The Rise of Meta and Mark Zuckerberg
Which brings me back to the Meta, and Mark Zuckerberg, and his strategic announcement on Fox News that he never liked fact-checking that much anyway and also people should be allowed to use slurs. Zuck is the latest billionaire man to line up and declare, if not fealty, then a concomitant form of loyalty unique to the mafia and similar to the demands of other rigid gang structures such as Scientology and corporate America. The announcement was couched in several inches of euphemism. Meta ‘will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse’ which in practice means queer people can be called mentally ill and women described as household objects because that’s what the internet was missing; aggressive misogyny and homophobia. I’m less interested in the loss of third-party fact checking. Fact checking used to appeal to me4 until I realised, later than I’m comfortable admitting, that trying to fact check someone like Trump (and especially the people who support him) is like telling a snake to keep its elbows off the table.
The Human and AI Intersection
Zuckerberg’s appearance on Fox News will come to be studied in semiotics classes for decades to come. And I do mean appearance. Received wisdom has it that pet owners tend to look a lot like their pets. Is it possible that the owners of generative AI products might, over time, come to come to take on the grim features of their mechanical caricatures? Here we have Zuck in what is essentially a proof of life video (filmed in a sauna, question mark?) for Donald Trump except the proof is ritual humiliation and the ‘life’ in question he’s offering is not his own or even the lives of billions of users across Meta’s platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp chiefly — but a metaphor. You won, he’s saying, and he wants to join the winning team. This is how fascism creeps. You are watching the accretion disk around felonious grievance form in real time. First it had the true believers and now it’s stacking up the losers who don’t really believe in anything for its own sake except self-preservation (which looks suspiciously a lot like the preservation of a $200 billion net worth). Zuck’s blood oath might not be worth quite so much but it’s certainly left him drained and pallid. Look at that skin tone. It’s the exact colour of that blind fish they found living in a sealed cave system.
Somewhere out there is an AI avatar5 of Zuck getting more human by the day while the tech CEO himself desperately reaches for the key to the sauna door he’s had sewn into his spleen for safekeeping, like a shittier version of Odysseus6. He’ll be fine, of course; you can’t crush mush. But if there is anything to be read into the cold, dead stare of those supplicant eyes, behind which some force a lot like consciousness dismissively waves the hand with the $1.5 million watch, it’s this: he doesn’t want to get out of the locked room. He wants you in it with him. If you like Nervous Laughter you can support it by becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for reading!
Personal Reflections
For what it’s worth, I spent my all too brief Summer break watching an extraordinary amount of test cricket, reading (work) and writing (other other work) but at a pleasant speed and without having to worry about the shape of that week’s reported story or the dreaded Saturday morning of publication or indeed picking up my phone to a single person. So, it felt like a holiday. And as such I have precious little to report back. Obviously my sister and her partner Jake came down with cherubic Hughbert (just Hugh, but to me he is Hughbie Doo or Hughbert or the Aristotelian adjacent Hughdaimonia) and my blessed little boy Duke the miniature dachshund who immediately resorted to his usual sleeping arrangements: under the blankets in the heat of December, mapped to the contours of my body like a breathing draught-stopper and snoring so improbably softly that I mistook the meep-meep-meep of his dreams for the sound of a very, very small truck trying to reverse several towns over. It was nice, the break, and lethargic in the way that Queensland summers in particular often force out of you on account of the humidity. I still ran. In fact, I ran and exercised more and more intensely during December than I have at any point in my entire life and, through this, may have caused a repetitive trauma to the muscles that connect my ribs (?) to my sternum (?) on account of trying to expand my chest cavity to breathe more deeply and so often. Apparently it’s quite common in athletes. My face brightened as I read all these untethered facts on my phone. ‘Can you believe it ma,’ I yelled at Mum through the door, affecting a US southern drawl. ‘A real life athletic injury for me, poor old Rick!’ It’s either that or something much worse. After one run I developed a fever so severe I was all but knocked out for 36 hours. Not long after that, thinking myself recovered, I tried again and the same thing almost happened again except instead I escape with a 15-hour headache of rather painful proportions. Since then I have been exercising at different intensities and distances to try and pinpoint what might be wrong, before I go and see a doctor. I’ve had it explained to me that the doctor should have been first on my list but really, and I mean this with all of my being, none of them in my home town allow me to book online. Mum heard me explain this and then did that thing where she gives up discussion because she can see that I am being completely serious. You can actually see her soul leave her body. Do not try to convince me lest you suffer the same fate. Anyway, welcome back, I guess! The study authors estimated a direct death toll from traumatic injury caused by the war in Gaza to be north of 64,000 people — a rate much higher than official reports from the Gaza Ministry of Health which have deaths at almost 50,000. Crucially, almost 60 per cent of these ar
