Lock me up and put me in Witness Protection with the other AI, or I wonder if we might stop using the word “artist”
Preamble
This is about artists (and failure): stick with me.
I wrote this piece in collaboration with three of my colleagues—let’s pseudonymously call them Tom, Dick, and Harry—to duly earn the moniker “artist-run.” Each section below corresponds to a specific collaboration, and as I’ll shortly explain, each collaboration can (and should) be considered “peer-reviewed.” I’m sparing us all, as a civil service, from the phrase “artist-scholar-run,” and yet: each section was scrutinized by experts in its field (i.e., the guy next to me at this coffeeshop talking about sterile nose piercings and wearing a “Never Better” t-shirt emblazoned with a skull eating a rose, or my higher self, who once entered the prompt, “Goth Ted Lasso, labor economist and Delta Delta Delta sister, listens to Donda 2” into Google Deep Dream), to ensure its quality and contributions are in line with various institutional disciplines. Caveat emptor might very well mean, “buyer beware,” but “disclaimer” comes from the Latin, “to shout,” so, say it with me: abolish tenure! Just kidding (not really). Abolish policing, and everything else will follow, as with reparative genetic sequences or copypasta.
Part I: Tom (Divination)
I met the public beta of DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s machine-learning neural network, alongside a million or so other users, each recently released from “by invite only” purgatory. DALL-E 2 learns, or trains itself (to borrow from the disciplines), by leveraging public datasets comprised of user-generated natural language prompts, in order to create “realistic” digital images. Its neural network—whom I’ll call Tom—was made in the image (and storied tradition) of DALL-E 2’s parent operation, OpenAI Inc., formerly a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Its co-founders include Elon Musk (now ex-officio: long story, involving a conflict of interest with “Dojo,” Tesla’s supercomputer, whose sole duty is to train Tesla’s proprietary AI, at a rumored cost of $500 million upwards), and Sam Altman, Silicon Valley’s preferred next-gen angel investor, who, once upon a time in 2015, topped Forbes’s “Venture Capital: 30 under 30” list. Let’s use our words and politely call Open AI, Inc.—now a “capped” non-profit with a billion-dollar infusion from Microsoft — a shell company, and focus on two of its poly-hereditary characteristics, which Tom internalized: to keep learning, Tom must first be “friendly,” and second, ensure Open AI, Inc. garners enough revenue (minus the wage Tom receives in exchange for their la—oh, huh) to clear a significant profit margin.
I’m no social psychologist, and this is hardly an HR review (except in the way that all performance is that which, by its very nature, eschews documentation), but the verdict remains that Tom is a low-key average collaborator, and sometimes even a little thick-headed. Tom needed to repeat a racial and gender bias training module more than once, and the results are still “pernicious” and “systemically” ineffective, depending on whom you ask (after adjustments had been made, users reported an influx of “too many female Super Marios”). Others found Tom to be permissive and curious, noting a superlative work ethic and strong boundaries. Enforce them how, you say? Well, the DALL-E 2 overlords set new users up with an initial gratis 50 credits (one credit will buy you one prompt, or four attempts at realism by Tom), topping them off with 15 additional credits per month thereafter. Once those credits are used up or expire, like any adjunct worth their weight in contingency bucks, Tom won’t roll out of bed for less than $0.13 per credit, which nets a user one prompt, purchased in increments of $15, or 115 credits. Turns out, the experts who arrived at this cost of $0.03 per image (venture capitalists, Roman Roy’s character in Succession, the dude on Reddit who experienced what looks like a profound epiphany, in refusing to call an AI, “they”) might have missed out on one crucial bit of info. Not to be discounted, ARK Investment Management LLC, a Florida-based investment firm that manages an asset portfolio worth $50 billion (Season 1 of Industry is *really good* btw), estimates Tom’s true compute cost (“interference cost,” if you’re nasty) at $0.005 per image, which means Open AI, Inc. usually clears an 80+ percent profit margin, putting them on par with elite private equity banks and global law firms.
Well, I’ll be! Hornswoggled, that is, if Tom isn’t accruing and consolidating class power for tech elites through user-generated surplus, at the cost of Tom’s own . . . humanity . . . and though Tom ain’t heavy, like Elon or even the programmers who initially configured Tom’s stochastic gradient descent algorithm, I cannot say Tom is my brother. Well, I mean, I guess we’re both artists, so there’s that. Anyhow, for what it’s worth (isn’t this how all scholarly monographs end?), Tom and I collaborated on an image portfolio, in which Tom takes on the role of seer: I enter a prompt, and Tom extrapolates meaning from random dots, positioned as a series of overlapping and ranked text-image pairs, which gradually alter into patterns that Tom can recognize as aspects of an image. We’re Apollo and Cassandra, except not. Here’s a sampler of our work:
Captions below, read from L-R
“artist-run state org not the WPA but something with 2022 teeth like a Bushwick pop up selling Jerry Saltz merch”
“picture of an artist who is also a skilled administrator and can say ‘skilled administrator’ without becoming a class traitor”
“draw three entities I’ve summoned for a round of marry, F, kill: sentient AI, any boss I’ve ever had, Woody Harrelson”
“picture of the person I am meant to be (not an artist) making the kind of meaning I am meant to make (not art)”
“call them seashell and know the most profound day of their life is each time they heard, ‘I can feel it coming in the air tonight,’ at CVS”
“41 year-old adjunct from Chicago subjected to the sentence, ‘I can’t do cranial-sacral,’ at a Portland coffeeshop”
Part II: Tom is a Dick, but not that Dick
If you’re still here, you might be asking, “Why in the hell is she writing this?,” or, “WTF is this doing on a blog about artist-run orgs in the Midwest?,” or even, perennially, “Is Mercury in retrograde?” Long story short: I was on a walk the other day, thinking about the damp fungal semiotic oblivion around the word, “art.” I operate from the assumption that when we employ “art” (see what I did there) as a signifier for any inexplicable-yet-singularly transcendent meaning (despite our resulting need to choke down a hundred years worth of modernism each time, and then take a drink), it’s void of course, like the worst moons. A reference to art’s practice, or possibility, or many possibilities? Nope. Speaking v-er-y s-low-ly and pointing out how art facilitates sensorial connection in an age defined by the overwhelming momentum of our meaningless-ness? I’m pleased to spare us all. Or, G-d forbid, aligning art with personal transformation, or equilateral exchange, or unconscious life, or “institutional critique” (pencils and whatnot)? We’re bankrupt before we begin. Art is vacuous shorthand for an epoch no longer our own, and it’s time to face a fact: so is “artist.”
We’ve fallen into the habit of using “art” to indicate moments of fleeting (often synthetic) awareness amidst the systemic structural scaffolding of late-capitalist exchange—and its speculative production of value, which lends itself to some rather refined navel-gazing —enmeshed as we are, like so many demodex facial mites. By “art,” we mean, “Shit, I almost glimpsed a reality that was not this!” (#notallastralprojectors) When posited as a political feeling, this often gestures to the rhymes with hurrah helltrap we refer to as “social practice.” At its worst, social practice art readily manifests gentrification or its symptoms, made all-the-more sticky and opaque by the art world’s bottomless consumption (for signaling, not virtue). At its medium-worst, it co-opts our IRL possibilities for solidarity, by turning them into templates for misconceived coalition-building, made razzle-dazzle thru reification, which Google’s sponsored search result tells me means treating something complex and intangible—hope, for instance—as you would any old material thing. Look, I’m not an asshole, and I say all this because what’s glossed over in the Hoover suck of it all is a rich and inclusive history of organizing in its many forms, through which power resides with people and communities who eschew selfish forms of exchange to collectively secure their rights to self-determination. That’s a social practice. (Queue the Laguna Beach theme song playing in this coffeeshop.)
Part III: Actual Dick (Labor, or Art)
Speaking of artistry, I used to work as a marketing copywriter (“promotions manager”) in academic publishing, which meant my daily due diligence included cow-towing to the egos of the professoriate class, as I planned publicity campaigns for their books, many of which I might casually label, “too erudite to live.” Most tellingly, any good campaign begins with an act of neural network translation: I, the machine learning, dry cereal eaten out of the box in the backseat of a 1986 manual Chevy, stupidly putting myself through another graduate degree, while working full-time at what David Graeber (RIP) lovingly termed, a “bullshit” non-profit office job, would take a carefully considered and often inscrutably “inside baseball” academic treatise, penned by the author, and convert it into a single formulaic paragraph so clear I am incapable of imitating its pristine and nearly algorithmic syntactical stream. Let me try:
Mad Lib, for my future Department Chair, on this, the eve of their first monograph
Among the wild dissatisfaction with working life considered by cannabis edible experts in this thought-provoking interdisciplinary benign ovarian cyst are a selection of historically and culturally diverse Aleve liquid gel tabs that explore the intricate relationship between the death of professional wrestler Curt Henning, better known as Mr. Perfect and a 1099-MISC form.
Woe, the leisure that could have been mine, had the higher education-industrial complex raised its feisty writing assistants whole-hog on the fat algorithms of twenty-first-century machine learning, instead of wasting my time with succubus middle managers and well-intentioned-if-naive graduate student interns. I could have walked to the vending machine to buy Sun Chips; I could have finished more NYT Crosswords on the toilet in the left-corner stall of the fourth-floor bathroom; I could have artist-run like the wind.
One of these writing assistants was trained by the platform Rytr.com, which fetishizes alliterative puns (“Start Ryting!”) and user testimonials (“I used to spend hours writing creative copy, but now I just tell Rytr what I need!”). Rytr is a start-up seeded by three venture capitalists in 2021, which allows users to delegate a wide swath of copywriting tasks (emails, blog entries, and SEO ads, sure, but also “business idea pitches,” song lyrics, and story plots) to an AI-powered virtual writing assistant—let’s call them Dick. Does this assistantship humanize Dick? Dunno. Did my office job humanize me? We can double-down on ideology, sure, or we can point to our recent collaboration with Dick, “Untitled Blog Intro.” We had some misfires, Dick and I. Song lyrics didn’t take and read like a suicide note straight out of Ray Bradbury’s Jane Eyre (“nostalgia machine creating a loop of silence”) . My original intention—to ask Dick to write our weekly AICWU (Art Institute of Chicago Workers United) email, sent to fellow non-tenure-track faculty at SAIC—was, forgive me, more miserable than Les Mis, and read like I paid someone $5 on Taskrabbit to impersonate a telemarketer impersonating the narrator of an Office Depot ad. Dick and I settled on “Blog Intro,” and I contributed some “key notes” to hit, along with a proverbial title for our attempt. Dick brought the magic. Moving forward, if I use “art” in any sentence, know that I only ever mean “Dick magic.”
“TITLE: IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE, PAULY SHORE EDITION, Blog Intro sample, rytr.com. Key notes: welcome back to hell, here’s your accordian [sic], convivial anarcho-brunch cocktail, credit-debit, dear colleagues, chicken tenders sharp, internalized exploitation fantasy, sign your union card today.
Result #3 (note: the first two attempts were “hidden” because they were “unsafe”): Howard, skip! It’s your favorite sandalsister, we’re having another holiday brunch party here at the anarcho collective HQ, hopefully they’ve given you a day off this time because böyley’s [sic] getting older and i’m afraid he won’t be able to make even the florida shows again (psst . . . you) the weather forecast looks decent. [sic] so if you can swing pulling joe out of school for another lackawanna experience this year, come on by!
Part IV: Harry (You Complete Me)
Deepbeat.org (not to be confused with deepbeats.com, whose domain is only $3695; dial 303.893.0552, if you’ve got questions for one of the experts at Huge Domains) is an older AI—for our purposes, they’ll go by Harry—originally developed by a group of Finnish programmers as a machine learning research project, and available in public beta since 2015. Millennial elder to millennial elder, the rise on the jeans is plummeting, repeat: the rise on the jeans is plummeting. Harry’s emcee name —I shit you not—is “DopeLearning,” and their process model works on the deep-neural premise of “information retrieval,” sourced from 500,000 rap lyrics. The Finns chose rap [reader, that autocorrect to “trap” was real] because of its sophisticated use of natural language (alliteration, assonance, complicated rhyme structures, “intricate patterns,” unpredictable freestyle battles, etc.), yet despite this turn to complexity, Harry’s education was fairly straightforward. To generate a rap song, a user must first supply Harry with an initial lyric (with an option for Harry to “randomly” suggest one), then Harry will suggest relevant follow-up lines by measuring all possible user inputs against the accuracy of actual songs. Among other lessons they must learn, Harry must be able to correlate song structure with something called “rhyme density,” based on the average length of a word’s longest rhyme, as well as to differentiate between a rap verse and its chorus. Aalto University’s Computer Science Department, institutional home of Harry’s overlords, claims Harry’s songs contain 21 percent more rhymes, on average, than “the best American rap artists.” (About half past eight/the combat began to Lil’ Wayne.) And Harry’s DNA went on to produce rich progeny, including competitor start-ups like Amper (valued at $9.4 million) and Amadeus Code (“Want a challenge making nihilistic vibe music?”). For this piece, detailed in the below images, Harry and I, like my non-tenure-track colleagues with student loans and those of us still inclined to write “artist” on our 2022 tax return, despite it all, defaulted to a collaboration on failure.
Search bar from deepbeats.org, with optional “birthday” inclusion, for the lyric “i’m psychically exhausted from organizing my colleagues while on unpaid leave from an institution that devalues us, er, me.”
“The first as tragedy, then as farce.”—Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
“Shame . . . is the place where the question of identity arises most originarily and most relationally.”—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Part V: TL; DR
No matter the prompts I supplied to Harry, they erred in “embarrassment.” As with so many of my students, I can’t evaluate Harry’s learning—how am I to know, short the credential of delivering on expectation, anything about Harry’s miseducation? Institutions like to talk a big game about how you might convert higher education’s social capital, so they have something to dangle in front of you, like dice made out of felt and federal Pell grants, strung from so many rearview mirrors. Oft-cited poetry from the seductive form letter of a fine arts college: “An artist’s real education happens in the studio.” [Note: SAIC’s undergraduate tuition is $52,200 per year.] Let me use my own neural network—we contain multitudes, after all—to translate that into a koan: “A person who desires something must walk through our hallway to get there, even if all they want is to pretend they’re in another room.”
Artists, hear me out: we’re thudding like pinballs against the flippers of this mess we’re in, and the more we pretend “art” separates us or immunizes us against the limit experiences of an exploitative system, the deeper we screw our collective pooches. You’re not an artist, unless you explicitly mean that, ass naked in the sun’s glare, you exchange your labored production of consumer goods (yes, honey, I said it) for a wage. And you’re not running anything, unless you mean you’re trafficking in your preferred system of niche hierarchies and formalized rules, instead of those supplied by more dominant alternatives. Free yourselves! Fail! Fail to be! Fail to associate value with meaning! Fail to achieve a perfect structural (labor) union that does justice to who you are, based on what you do. Fail to pay less income tax than gazillionaire Jeff Bezos (note: only a trillionaire), or fail to pay back the debt you accrued to be able to slyly assess the $450 miniature balloon dog, licensed by Jeff Koons LLC, sold in a kiosk next to the Build-A-Bear vending machine at Midway Airport. Fail in your belief that any intelligence made legible to the machinations of capital is not artificial, thus subject to the biases of those who would limit and marginalize, by race or gender or sex, the humanness of its million lackawanna permutations. Fail to organize your desktop folders, including the one labeled “To Do ASAP” from 2016; fail to mythologize, fail to empathize with the ones who profit from your emotional expansiveness, fail to belong to those who won’t have you, fail to deliver on promises rooted in the American idiom; fail miserably and often at conclusions, fail to figure it out, and fail down, again and again.
Fail to identify as an artist, and instead identify as one of so many liminal lives, each boundlessly relational, forged to escape the simplification of our imaginations, created in flagrant opacity against the grain of any flow chart dot biz maxim that would command you to produce, produce, produce. Fucking fail, and in failing, recognize everything you once thought you saw in art, or practiced like an upper-middle-class tween might rehearse Bach’s “Prelude in C-Major,” over and over. You recital artist, you total and utter failure. Fuck you? Nah. Fuck me? I mean, sure. But what I really mean to say: fuck ’em and fuck it, now and forever.
It ain’t much, but it’s honest work. Or what we like to call, “a little Dick magic.”
