Generative AI: The Cultural Dominatrix Indefinitely Extending Postmodernism

Signup Write New Story Generative AI: The Cultural Dominatrix Indefinitely Extending Postmodernism by The_AI_Ethicist by The_AI_Ethicist | @ theaiethicist Interdisciplinary teacher writing irreverent essays on AI, philosophy, and cars.

Interdisciplinary teacher writing irreverent essays on AI, philosophy, and cars.

There's a popular tourist attraction close to where I live called the Ballard Locks. It's an old lock complex that raises and lowers boats going between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, and it also has a pretty nifty fish ladder, which is why the site attracts more than 1 million visitors annually. But there's been a small, recent change involving an interpretive sign that has caused a bit of a stir, and it's all because of AI. Many people see this as yet another invasion of AI into the human world, but I interpret the presence of this banal AI-generated sign as a strong signal of something else entirely—it gives us great insight into the current cultural period.

When the pope and a white jacket, Harry Potter and a fashion brand, and a prestigious American university and an email all become mainstream news specifically because of generative artificial intelligence, that says a lot. You know what says even more? When the outputs of AI are so commonplace in contemporary culture that even the Army Corps of Engineers is using it to produce an interpretive sign at a tourist spot.

With AI being used to create cultural artifacts quickly and at scale, all while being available to the masses, this indicates AI is industrializing vast swaths of cultural production. More importantly, it is doing so through a variety of postmodern cultural logics, meaning vital parts of postmodern cultural logic have become industrialized. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to late postmodernism.

In March 2023, images surfaced online of the pope wearing a fashionable, expensive-looking puffy-style white jacket. Naturally, the image spread quickly and garnered millions of views, with even the mainstream media reporting on it. People were genuinely shocked to learn that the pope would wear such a jacket because, you know, he’s the pope and all. Luckily the pope didn't need to respond because the image was generated using the AI image generator Midjourney, though that didn't stop many people from believing it was true. The next example brings two very disparate forms of culture: a fantasy world and a fashion brand.

When you hear the word “Balenciaga,” Harry Potter probably doesn’t come to mind unless you’re aware of the marriage between those two because of AI, which gave us Harry Potter by Balenciaga. What the hell am I on about? In 2023, a video was uploaded to YouTube that used AI to re-imagine the characters of Harry Potter as Balenciaga models. It became extremely popular and has almost 15 million views to back it up. In fact, it became a meme format itself and inspired Star Wars by Balenciaga, Avengers by Balenciaga, Lord of the Rings by Balenciaga, and more. At least it was made with fun in mind. This next example clearly demonstrates that sometimes it's better to simply not use AI.

In February 2023, the EDI office at Vanderbilt University sent an email to students and staff addressing the then-recent deadly school shooting at Michigan State University. At the bottom in small print came an admission that the email was a paraphrase from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Unsurprisingly, this was not well received. The students locked the offender in her office for three days with only Funyuns and Mountain Dew for sustenance before releasing her. Nah, not really, but a mild apology was given, a couple of signatories on the original email stepped back from their responsibilities, and other administrators made it very clear they were in no way responsible. Good times.

You may be thinking, “So what? So AI was used to make some things. Big deal.” And fair enough—that is factually and boringly true. But I’m looking at all this through the lens of cultural production by generative AI, whose use has become so commonplace it's become part of not just Internet culture but popular and mainstream culture as well. And heck, let's not forget that the lowly interpretive sign at the locks shows it has permeated even mundane culture.

But let's take a deeper dive into each of these cultural artifacts produced through AI because they perform the cultural logics of three postmodern philosophers, which gives us a little insight into what the hell is actually going on.

People have been generating silly images with generative AI since it became available to the public because it's just so gosh darn fun! You're damn straight I've had an AI turn my poodle mix into a tattooed Harley-riding motorcycle gang boss. I mean, who hasn't? In any case, the pope in a certain puffy white jacket just seemed to strike a chord with the public at large because it spread like wildfire through online and traditional media, and it fooled many, many people. Turns out a crazy French philosopher talked about this back in the ‘80s.

So, Jean Baudrillard…Though he would probably hate it, I like to call him the prophet of postmodernism, because so much of what he talked about has become easily observable in our contemporary times. He identified and described a cultural phenomenon whereby simulations supersede reality itself, with the end stage called hyperreality. And even though the pope image fooled many people, I'm not going to say we're at the point where simulations have taken precedence over reality itself, but my uncontrollable perspiration is a good sign we're getting closer and closer…to hyperreality or the sun. I leave it up to you to choose which.

In any case, if AI is ubiquitous as a tool of cultural production that has the ability to push us if not shove us towards hyperreality through its generated content, that sounds to me as if it is producing the cultural logic Baudrillard was describing. That means simulated and hyperreal cultural production through AI at scale.

If you're unconvinced the pope image is evidence of us losing touch with reality, I got something for ya. Notice how when an extraordinary cultural artifact is produced, there are immediate accusations of AI generation, whether that's true or not. I call that losing touch with reality because of generative AI, but if you prefer some other term like fluffy white feelings of uncertainty, we can go for that instead. I mean, I'm sure there's some value in doubting everything that could have ever possibly been made with AI, though I'm not sure it extends far beyond an involuntary stay at a mental institution. Pick your battles, I guess.

In addition to being extremely clever, Harry Potter by Balenciaga demonstrates yet another postmodern cultural logic, Fredric Jameson’s pastiche. Jameson wrote in his defining essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.

Pastiche is thus blank parody.” Harry Potter by Balenciaga fits this definition rather well. The creator of the video, Alexander Niklass, confirmed its intent to the New Yorker, which reported: “The combination of child-friendly film and adult luxury fashion neither held any particular symbolism nor expressed an artistic intent. It’s ‘entertainment,’ Niklass said.

Yet the video’s most compelling aspect might be its vacuity, a meaningless collision of cultural symbols. The nonsense is the point.” Boy, I tell ya what, it's hard to get a better example of Jamesonian pastiche than that.

Remember, AI employs pastiche in its generation of outputs. When a user asks an AI to generate an email, it's not retrieving a preprogrammed response—instead, the AI is combining disparate fragments of learned patterns to create a coherent text response unironically and without parody or critical intent, in the idiosyncratic style of an email. And given this creation of cultural artifacts by means of pastiche is something AI excels at doing, we see this come up frequently in Internet and popular culture. That means AI has industrialized the postmodern cultural logic of Jamesonian pastiche, where originality has been exhausted and culture increasingly recombines existing forms. Alrighty then.

I mean, I get the temptation to use AI for a very emotionally challenging email; that's not an easy thing to write. But I also understand the temptation to do massive amounts of cocaine and go on an indulgent spree at the local red light district, but somehow I've managed to refrain from any of the above. In any case, this particular use of AI highlights another postmodern theory: the death of the author.

Roland Barthes wrote “The Death of the Author” in the late ‘60s, and the idea behind it was that meaning ultimately comes from the audience rather than the author. Up until that point, meaning was typically associated with authorial intent; Barthes disagreed. He argued the meaning of a text lies in the interaction between text and reader rather than trying to mind read an author’s intent. And what I particularly enjoy about his theory is that the more the audience tries to infer authorial intent, the more they inadvertently create their own meaning. Man, Barthes, what an alpha.

And really think about it: Barthes described the death of the author; AI says yep and shows what happens as a result, for who is the author of an AI output? Is it the person who prompted it? At best that would make an advanced prompter similar to a conceptual artist. So then, is it the training data or feedback? No. So an AI that doesn’t generate unless prompted puts us in a little pickle when it comes to authorship—as in it's absent. And if there's no author of an AI output, that leaves all of the meaning up to the audience. Of course, this applies not only to text but to all forms of generation: sound, video, photos, code and more. In case you're counting, that's now the third postmodern cultural logic AI manifests.

Who would've thought that the pope in a puffy white jacket, a video of Harry Potter by Balenciaga, and an emotionally absent email sent by university administrators would demonstrate how generative AI instantiates postmodern cultural logic as it produces cultural artifacts? Lest we forget, ever since it became available to the public at large, it has produced large amounts of culture. We had an earlier postmodern technology, the Internet, industrialize the distribution of culture. We now have generative artificial intelligence industrializing much of the production of culture.

And note the examples are from early 2023, only months after the public release of ChatGPT. AI outputs are now so ubiquitous that they rarely make the news these days, demonstrating a public saturated in AI.

First, let's address why this isn't a signal we've moved beyond postmodernism, and let me do so with an analogy. If I'm a Volvo collector with five Volvos one day, and the next day I have 20, have I suddenly become a Ford collector because of all these Volvos I own? If not, why would intensifying postmodernism move us out of postmodernism? Because that's exactly what we get with AI: more postmodernism.

I also think it's fair to say this period of postmodernism is distinct; the intensification alone would suggest that. However, that pales in comparison to the fact that up until recently, cultural production was relegated to humans. That is no longer the case with artificial intelligence. Yeah, I'll give you a few moments to sit with that one.

Remember, if AI was simply used by a single nerdy dude living in his mom's basement, the impact on culture would likely be imperceptible. These three examples from pop culture, and even more so from the boring interpretive sign, show the precise opposite scenario has occurred.

And since there haven't been any new agreed-upon dominant cultural logics with nearly any comparable cultural penetration, in essence we have digital programs that produce cultural artifacts at scale by instantiating the still dominant cultural logics from the ‘60s and ‘80s. So depending on your perspective on postmodernism, you're going to love or hate what this implies.

So we have the postmodern cultural epoch. AI is created in that epoch, within the conditions of postmodernism, and draws largely from that culture. AI produces cultural artifacts through the instantiation of postmodern cultural logics. These artifacts proliferate throughout culture, and AI is trained on these artifacts, only to continue the loop of exhausted yet intensified cultural logics. All of this screams late…at least to me. We can go with tardy postmodernism if you prefer. I am a teacher…

The only way I see out is the inevitable production of an original cultural artifact absent human input through an advanced machine's own sensory abilities, challenging humanity's self-perception and putting us in whatever the next cultural epoch is. Why? Well, let me put it as gently as I can: we're much, much too fragile to have our image as the only creators of art and culture (even if only conceptually) shattered without some very serious self-reflection and epochal repercussions that follow.

So, what do the pope in a white jacket, Harry Potter Balenciaga models, and an ill-advised university letter all have in common? They demonstrate the increasing cultural power of generative artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, it seems, has brought with it late postmodernism.

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