Cade Diehm via nettime-l on Sat, 1 Mar 2025 15:46:03 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> The Baudrillardian Superintelligence Paradox: Capital's Terminal Simulation

It is very popular to describe skepticism and rejection of generative artificial intelligence as a form of neoreactionary/"neo-luddite" fear. Such a claim has infested the discourse more widely - from bewildered policymakers to the chittering LinkedIn class and everyone in between. So I am surprised to have had such a visceral reaction to this email thread, given the likelihood that such a discussion would eventually crop up here.
Backing up to an argument floated in mid February: To compare suspicions of generative AI against those leveled at photographic camera is to reveal a very severe gap in thinking about the interplay between technology and the world. Yes, both "have [shutter/prompts/aperture/weights] to tweak, both had a technological rise and a consequential impact on the societies they were birthed in. Both strive to produce realism from the machine. Both offer democratic access to a kind of artistry. But the similarities end there.
The camera never offered to be a painter or an illustrator, it offered realism. In order to use the camera, one needs mobility and the ability and agency to compose both the objects and light of the world and the viewfinder into a freeze frame. For a long time, the camera was a one-way fragile skill of chemistry, delicate archival and taste - developing and storing film, and selecting ideal frames. The camera was bound to the immediacy of the world around its operator. Much of the pushback at the time was contained to a select labour force: portraiture painters whose work was threatened by the introduction of such tools.
In contrast, the conceptual centre of generative AI is /trickery/, and this trickery extends throughout the entire technology - from its conceptual core to its human-computer interface. To start with the system of generation itself: whether image synthesis or LLM text output, such tools are the sums of averages, a statistical best-guess of a user's text input disguised as authoritative, creative and informed. Moving closer to the user, such tools are often cloaked in interfaces that mimic human interaction, play up personality and flatter the user through chat-style interfaces or voice. They are positioned as SaaS products designed to synthesize reality, where output quality and the inability to detect their use are seen as desirable performance metrics.
One just needs to look at the breathless tripe put forth by doomsday luminaries (https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/), or the childlike delusional wonder in communities such as r/ChatGPT to see how the constellation of fraud can cultivate a fantastical belief in the ghost in the machine, near religious-levels of fear of fervor of consciousness in silicon, in systems assembled from nothing more ELIZA meeting the mechanical turk. This is plato's cave at its most unsophisticated (but energy intensive).
The trickery extends beyond the AI, its interface and its models, perpetuated outwards by the user. Let's use this very mailing list thread as the example: Pit disclosed their use of ChatGPT, in the 12.02 initial email, but only once I had read the entire email did I realise that this did not come from Pit's own mouth or mind. Why, then, should I read this, who is this for? Should Pit had chosen to not disclose their use of AI, it is up to me to discern whether such communication is borne from within or from outside the consciousness of the person at the other end of the screen. This means that I must be suspicious of all text and imagery that I encounter. Here, I am suspicious of their fabrication, rather than applying actual critical media theory. That, too, is trickery.
The shitty outcome of the photographic camera was a glut of bad portraiture companies, police mugshots, colonial dominance (https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/the-imperial-sensorium/) and wedding photographers. The shitty outcome of AI is a world where image and thought is at best soft-constrained by mathematical averages, unable to reach into the novel, whilst being completely severed from the id and ego of the individual who would have previously been the primary source of such expression. At same time, any chud can shower me in outputs from the rancid genocidal insides of his brain with zero effort. All he needs is working, well worn, high interest credit card. The two technologies and their philosophies and contexts are not and never will be analogous.
In other words, the shitty outcomes of the photographic camera are /systemic/, whereas the shitty outcomes of generative AI//are /existential. /Sneering at the resistance to AI while invoking a now ubiquitous technology (the camera) as an inevitable steamrolling of said resistance is to offer a fundamentally incomplete view of how this might play out.
All of this assumes that the economic ascendance of AI follows its treasonous predecessors of the 'sharing economy', an untested and lazy assumption that very well may not manifest, due to the economic and material costs of AI and the rapid deceleration of 'progress' by the industry.
We are now close to fifty years into 'the computer revolution'. There exists a lot of good writing to rebuke the Californian ideology that now canvases the world unquestioned, maybe some at nettime are familiar with this writing, no? In the context of AI, a thought: Maybe—given the computer's unbreakable ties to cybernetics and the bloodlust freak hawks of the US military-industrial complex—it is those who embrace cyberspace, software and its affects who are neoreactionary, or at least deeply conservative. The computer is not a fringe curiosity any more; the computer is as ubiquitous as the car, metastasizing into every corner of our lives. What progressive dream can be found in such domination, especially one so utterly tied to sources of capital for its continued existence?
AI is a reinforcement of this form of neoreactionary dream living: a paternalistic hierarchical system, dressed as liberation but wholly dependent on top-down free market economics and extraction. An easy life for lying about your love for your husband (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0BXZhdDqZM) or allowing you to automate away the (https://getpickle.ai/) /managerial feudalism/ hellscape you live in, to borrow from David Graber. To embrace AI within the bounds of the current market forces and product landscape, /and/ at the expense of those who are suspicious of such technologies, is to embrace the stagnant material conditions of the moment with a technology that likely reinforces these artificial limits. 

Cade

https://newdesigncongress.org

On 01.03.25 13:17, Stefan Heidenreich via nettime-l wrote:
all this, as so much of our 'thinking' about AI, is being written and thought in phase 1: the imitation phase. when new tech still tries to wrap itself around old tech & known formats & content. characterized by an overproduction of hopium, meant to attract investors. 
like when movies still strove to look like theatre.
let's think a little bit ahead (and not be lured backwards by the always (neo)reactionary AI bias towards all the past txt it knows): when machines once again redefine our notion of ourselves and the world. when it's not about failed cats and dogs, but machine trained perfectionated dog-cat-drone-bots. and when we enter the brilliant new age of 'crapularity' (thx Florian Cramer) ;)
ps: did any one bother to read Alex Karp's new book: Technological Republic. fresh out on Anna's Archive? 

ps2: this reply was written using a well domesticated old IBM keyboard.

stefan


Am 13.02.25 um 20:15 schrieb Pit Schultz via nettime-l:
Yann LeCun, speaking recently at the Grand Palais with its cathedral-like acoustic reverb (still unmanaged by AI audio processing plugins), mentioned that today an average house cat has more real-world (one-shot) intelligence 
than the best-performing LLM.

For some reason, he recently switched from dogs to cats in trying to
allegorically demonstrate that the architecture of current large AI
projects aiming to "achieve AGI" is fundamentally flawed.
As a dog owner, I know how hard it is to train a dog, but also how easy it 
becomes when you try to go with the flow and understand the motives or
embedded characteristics of your dog.

AIs are not far from that stage, even beyond the weak alignment "potty
training" to make them behave better. They're
philosophically/phenomenologically fundamentally flawed, but still quite
capable.
Word processors and typewriters had their impact on writing, and genAI will 
have its impact too.
I recommend trying out NotebookLM, domesticated by writer Steven Johnson in 
such a way that everything you input ends up in a specific kind of
patronizing left-mid-liberal inclined podcast dialogue between two
artificial radio hosts.[1]
The method I used here might be of interest, using a team of LLMs and then finally letting the two with the best "style" and "character" condense the 
final result in a battle mode.

I used Mistral, Llama, ChatGPT-Omni, Perplexity Sonar, Gemini-Flash,
DeepSeek-R1, and Anthropic Claude Sonnet in an iterative group think,
moderating them as hard as possible.

In the "collaborative" process, most of them clearly indicated that they
had been trained with openly available nettime data (without permission). 

In this way, letting AI write the text takes longer than writing it
yourself. It might address the points you intended, but it will certainly 
add new points and cut away others, only reproducing your own style of
thinking from a meta perspective.
By the way, for future parsing, it can help to disclose that AI was used.
Nevertheless, there are speech patterns so characteristic that it's still 
quite easy to identify the writing style.

What they call AI slop today is probably the next retro charm of media
massage.


[1]
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/c7862110-2b14-4a97-bea1-e7a3191d437e/audio 


p.s.
Btw, it´s funny, when former post-structuralists and far-leftists discover 
that their late sympathy for humanist German idealism, or rather the
romantic Biedermeier version of it (unheimlichkeit), takes a Spenglerian
turn. it's even funnier that it's not the critique of content but the form, when the construction of authorship turns into an essentialist argument for 
auratic originality. i'd rather try to find counter-narratives to
deterministic thermodynamic "scaling laws", TESREAL aka californian
ideology 3.0, when even the war room of wired magazine is almost ready to 
escape from san francisco. didn't foucault dream of the numerability of
fundamental utterances in the archive as a sign of the technology of power? 
if large amounts of compute are alienating the already instrumentalized
rest of us, why not.


On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 4:01 PM Frédéric Neyrat via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:


hi sh:
excellent question! why using a camera, and which one? If questioning the 
technology we use, when we use it and why, is meaningless, it confirms
Bifo's point about AI & dementia.

best,

fn


On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 8:11 AM Stefan Heidenreich via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:


Hi,


Why did you decide to use AI to generate this text?
isn't that a funny question? Soon it will sound like in the 19 century: 
'why did you use a camera to make that image?' or 'Images/texts
generated by camera/AI or not real art/thoughts.'
An btw: I guess it's a pun anyway. How long did it take you to generate the msg you like. How much time did you spend to adjust the prompt (the 
camera)?

best
sh


   Why this decision, what

is its meaning, its purpose? You can use AI to answer my question,

which

would be an answer as such (a tautology actually, a mediated answer

that

would confirm what sort of message it is, to borrow from McLuhan). If

you

answer my question with the help of any AI, I wonder how far this
decision should, retroactively, question your first post and change the 
way

to read it.

Best,

Frédéric



   (LLL, 2025)
__________________________________




On Wed, Feb 12, 2025 at 4:37 PM Pit Schultz via nettime-l <
nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> wrote:


The Baudrillardian Superintelligence Paradox: Capital's Terminal

Simulation


Sam Altman's three scaling laws for artificial intelligence -

logarithmic

intelligence gains, hyper-deflationary costs, and super-exponential

value -

mask capitalism's terminal phase: an accelerated collapse into

algorithmic

hyperreality where AI-generated market simulations supersede and

ultimately
consume material reality. A Marxist-Baudrillardian synthesis allows us 
to

map how superintelligence triggers financial implosion. This occurs

through

three interlocking mechanisms:






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