Doomscroll: New art and the nature of human intelligence in the age of machine learning.
There is an ongoing psychological battle between machine learning and humankind. Many leading technology experts believe that the next five years will completely decimate white-collar jobs. The rapid advancements of machine learning are already becoming visible.
The artist’s role is to represent the nature of something as honestly as possible. So, I wanted to do a piece about the nuanced psychological impact of our transition state and explore the philosophical questions we now face in our search for meaning: Where do we look? As I was I was traveling in Italy at the time, this became the background context for the image — fundamentally about AI.
Machine learning will eventually replace our jobs with self-service checkouts or self-driving cars. But the actual march of advancement is more sinister. Rather than replacing our jobs, the algorithm’s direction up to this point has been to make us do their work and influence us as psychological technology. Meaningful work is being substituted by gambling attention online, causing addiction and social erosion.
Instagram is one of the most addictive platforms.
Meta’s core design uses advanced gambling technologies, Similar to a Vegas slot machine under the hood. We feed it with attention or content, our work, rather than our money. It rewards us or punishes us in the planned randomness a slot machine does. Every gambler feels a rush before they post, which is an addictive emotion. Whether they win or lose, the hope that they will strike it lucky keeps the gambler returning despite a net loss of time, money, and spirit. One of the predictions from the Bhagavad Gita is that the age of Kali Yuga will increase in gambling. Trapping us in a steady decline: the mode of ignorance. But the veiled introduction of gambling technologies as social applications has led everybody to sleepwalk into this.
Artwork generated by the social media algorithm is always, in essence, generated by it — machine learning rewards high-probability work. The ‘Known knowns’. Information online has performed well, so if we produce imagery with recognisable similarities but some differences, the social media algorithm will reward us. This results in Homogenisation promoted as truth.
Social media platforms have changed to the normative painting approaches of humans because of their preferences. One example is the traced photograph or nostalgic moment — painted photos and a simple personal, insightful story below — where you discover more about the artist or the work. The Facebook algorithm operates on three fundamental principles: insight, discovery, and collection. Studies from psychologists identified these as particularly Moorish. The combination of the core priorities of machine learning and gambling technologies has transformed art: Metas dataset is fundamentally trained on photography and screen limitations, so we see the new normal being paintings that emerge from the dataset.
Formulaic YouTube videos and the aid of projection tracing accompany the algorithmic pressure. New Artwork made by machine and man simultaneously is cyborg art. It has tropes of being human, But giving over freedom of expression in return for being rewarded by dopamine from an algorithm means giving up the essential faculty of humans — the freedom of thought.
Because of machine learning, the internet has become self-generating in its expansion. It doesn’t matter if work is by artificial intelligence or humans acting on its behalf as long as it follows the rules and maintains engagement. Today, people in America spend roughly fifty per cent of their time online; by twenty-thirty, it’s projected to increase to seventy per cent. The same phenomena that led to the increase in the internet alt-right on one corner of the internet are the phenomena forcing artists to produce masses of painted photographs on another: engagement farming.
In the Vedic scriptures, time is circular and not linear. Native visual languages evolved to accommodate the nuance of place and complex stores and meaning. Civilisations before us expressed tragedies similar to today’s, leaving fragmentary tools and meaning to help chart experience. Sometimes, we stumble across them by mistake. In almost all ancient cave art, for example, there are few to no self-portraits at all. Scenes of flickering animals and chases dominate, and experiencing the cave in three dimensions is vital. The still-surviving Dogon tribe of Mali uses spatial and visual language woven into buildings to form an intergenerational dreamscape. Etruscan culture formed the basis for early Roman art: we see dances and symbols of swans found in both Etruscan and Vedic mythologies. Veils between the netherworld and human life lift, and parties burst out. Etruscan imagery read from right to left as partial hieroglyphic scenography.
The Beyux tapestry in Normandy adopts a similar scroll format. Still, it shows a human understanding of a historical event: the normal and the exciting were parked next to each other in an elusive narrative arc. The consequential and inconsequential were blurred. This art is good, but it requires a different sort of engagement. There is more than instantaneous jubilation; the single format social media promotes.
The pressures of online life mean we have manifested new desires to escape. The Italian architectural theorist Carlotta Franco speaks about Heterotopias appearing in Italy, a strange or ambivalent place that defies normality and the logic of internet order. These Tuscan resorts are heterotopic environments: Tourists from dense urban environments desperately need a way to escape the psychological screens and flock to Tuscany. However, the problems with the place of origin reveal themselves most clearly in the dream of escape. Tuscany quickly becomes a mirror for Silicon Valley.
In the famous game of animal crossing, which grew in popularity during COVID-19, players would build their vision of the countryside with friends, plants, and vegetables. This dreamworld of the countryside allows players to indulge in their most excessive cute fantasy. Psychoanalysts pointed to the fact that people would play because they had no way of influencing the reality of their urban lives; animal crossing players were building a space to reveal a lack. The escape was temporary; when urbanised people tried to move to the countryside to realise the fantasy, they were deeply disappointed, almost experiencing Paris syndrome. The algorithm that they felt the need to escape from was part of them.
But is there a tangible way to escape the doomscroll? The theoretical physicist Godel constructed a proof that states there are always limits to an algorithm — a computation flawed by the ability of humans to see higher logical orders. Things present within that logic system but are not perceptible by the system itself. Roger Penrose detailed the implications in his book The Emperor’s New Mind.
The critical difference is that we can see the scale and multiplicity of connections that a machine cannot. — above, beyond, and in between. Kurt Gödel provided axiomatic proof. The reason for this is still unclear, but Penrose speculates that it is probably due to some quantum capacity. We may not discover the valid reason until the distant future.
This truth Gödel discovered implies a direction for the arts after machine learning: there is a future where artists can jump scales of meaning and connect low-probability connections, live within idiosyncrasies, hold contradiction and complexity, and evidence a capacity to understand the ‘unknown unknowns’ bringing us into a new era of the contemporary.
By revealing the uniqueness of the human mind in contrast to artificial intelligence, theoretical physicists like Gödel have simultaneously shown restrictions and given us the guidelines to establish a new art after machine learning.
Now, the post-internet era has shifted into the post-machine learning era. Predictable abstraction, trend-driven, traced, or painted images are not fit for our time or our value. They represent machine intelligence carried out by humans: the new art must be human intelligence in its true form.
