The Postfictional Eerie
AI and the freudian Unheimlich of the Digital.
OpenAIs release of its video model Sora made me think about the real and the fake again. In a previous post, i already wrote about some technical implications and timeframes in context of movie production, but here, i want to talk about the weirdness of it all, which goes beyond AI-tech and hallucinations alone.
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The Weird and the Eerie
In his posthumously published book The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher described some of the "anomalous" fiction published in the 20th century wich worked to "de-center the human subject".
Here's Mark Fisher (not) talking about Deepfakes in his chapter Approaching the Eerie:
The weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong.
Here's Mark Fisher (not) talking about pretty much all image and video synthesis:
The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing , or is there is nothing present when there should be something.
He also writes that the questioning of authenticity and constitution of a thing inherently belongs to the weird and the eerie.
A bird’s cry is eerie if there is a feeling that there is something more in (or behind) the cry than a mere animal reflex or biological mechanism — that there is some kind of intent at work, a form of intent that we do not usually associate with a bird.
What exactly is strange about it? Is, perhaps, the bird possessed — and if it is, by what kind of entity? Such speculations are intrinsic to the eerie, and once the questions and enigmas are resolved, the eerie immediately dissipates.
This describes very accurately what is happening in the digital realm, not just since the advent of AI. On the web and in the digital, we constantly question the realness and the intent of what we read, see and hear.
"On the internet, noone knows you are a dog" is a statement about the weird, "the presence of that which does not belong" -- dogs afaik don't use the web very much and it is very unlikely that you meet a dog on social media. What the dog-meme as a metaphor says is that you can never be sure about who you're talking to, what you see and what you hear. The unknown, anonymous user/dog is weird as an entity that is inherently cut off from consensus reality by choice.
It is also a statement about the user/dog's eerieness, because you can never be sure about the intent of why that the "human pretending"-entity is doing that. Is that account a scam, a fake, a criminal, a honest person with a very high priority of privacy, a bad actor, a good actor, a state sponsored troll? You can't know. In the digital, you can never know. Encapsulated in the digital, mediated reality forever is doomed to be weird and eerie, and it has been since it's very inception.
Correlate Everything
As the meme goes, AI is a Shoggoth, and nothing describes the weird and the eerie of AI better than H.P. Lovecrafts opening line in The Call of Cthulhu:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
Not not-weird and the not-eerie, the stuff we know and love, were we feel home and whole, is what we can relate to each other, which is never everything.
I've written plenty about how AI is making all the data it sucked up into an automatized knowledge interpolator, and what is the interpolation of data points other than "correlating all its contents"?
We invented machines to produce Mark Fisherian essays in the style of Ramones punk songs, which can be turned into a prompt for the image synthesization of a Picasso painting: Correlating all data points to all it's contents is weird and eerie. A Mark Fisher essay in the style of The Ramones does not belong to either Fisher or The Ramones, it's neither philosophy nor punk, it is weird and it is a failure of presence.
Arguably, the interpolative possibilities in a multimilliondimensional latent space are near infinite. Arguably, the number of narratives and stories posted every day in the web are, too, so large that we can't possibly grasp them.
It's a new infinity of "endless symbols" entering our daily lives on pocket computers we stare at all day, "doomscrolling" from funny vids to political outrage to sincere art to spam and ads to bits of news until our brains are mush and we're in dire need for digital detox.
The digital was inherently weird and eerie long before statistical models came into being, where a swarm of users was and is "correlating all its contents" to a much larger extend than we mere humans are able to do or to grasp. The advent of AI merely makes visible the inherent weirdness lurking behind the "task solving abilities" of boundless correlated digital data, which is both a property of AI aswell as swarm intelligence.
It's exactly that unsettling, unnerving, uncanny feeling in the face of the infinite that Lovecraft talked about in his stories of cosmic horror, and which Mark Fisher so profoundly identified as weird and eerie.
We carry around this weirdness on pocket computers and talk to it, day by day, and sometimes, we call them black mirrors.
The Post-Fictional
With lovecraftian Unknown Unknowns populating our daily lives, where we can never be sure what is the fictional and the real, or if we are narrator or the audience, we enter an age of the post-fictional.
By dissolving the difference of subject and object in the digital space, the weird and the eerie takes hold of and enters the real world through postfictional narratives. The postfictional layers atomized bits of the factual and the fictional into new narrative objects which are weird and eerie in a Fisherian sense.
If you take AI hypesters by their words (and you shouldn't), then AI has "read all of the internet" and "seen all of art history". Arguably and beyond hype, AI has seen and read enough to put out plausible text and somewhat believable imagery of anything.
We don't know yet if the much talked about "hallucinations" will ever vanish to such an extend, to make AI output truly reliable or in the case of imagery, truly indifferentiatable from photography. CGI has still not crossed the uncanny valley since the first computer animated scenes in the 80s and we can still see when "there is something present where there should be nothing" or when there is a "presence of that which does not belong".
But let's suppose we do cross that line and synthetic, computed images, video and text become truly indifferentiatable from humanly produced fictions and physical realities. This, then, would fully enable "the human mind to correlate all (the worlds) contents", to fully dissolve the difference between the fictional and the real, while the networked swarming activity of narration and reception makes sure that everybody is storyteller and audience at the same time.
AI and the digital traps us in a postfictional freudian uncanny, the Unheimlich in german, the un-home-ly, "where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context".
Here are some recent headlines illustrating our new post-fictional world, the dissolution of the boundaries between the fictional and consensus reality: the victims of gun violence and mass shootings lobby congress from beyond the grave, After breakups, the brokenhearted are creating AI clones of their exes, and Deepfake electioneering sparks AI 'return' of controversial dictator Suharto.
These are just some of the post-fictional stories of digital hauntology, where digital ghosts of the past manifest in the present by relating datapoints in a latent space to all contents in the world, where the swarming virality of those ghosts “de-center the human subject” and blur the boundaries of the narrator and her audience.
This is a world of Freuds Unheimlich, where Mark Fishers weird and the eerie meets a swarm of billions of users which, all together, create a new post-fictional space in the digital.
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