Our March Read: The Uncanniness of Algorithmic Style
Scott B. Weingart joins me to discuss asking the wrong things of machines
In March, we’ll be reading a short reflection from Kyle Chayka on “The Uncanniness of Algorithmic Style.” Chayka is a thoughful writer on how our aesthetics reflect and shape our understanding of the world. His first book is The Longing for Less: Living with Minimalism, and another essay of his I’ve returned to repeatedly is “Welcome to Airspace,” in which he dissects the deliberate placelessness of certain coffeeshops, coworking spaces, and AirBnBs.
In our reading for this month, Chayka looks at the way computers fill in the gaps by extending (and overextending) what they’ve already seen.
There’s an aesthetic evolving out of algorithmic visuals like Flight Simulator. It reminds me of Google’s machine-learning Deep Dream filter, which is supposed to visualize how a machine-learning system is perceiving an image, but ends up turning everything into hallucinatory dogs, which is what the system was trained to recognize.
These tools aren’t bad, exactly, but they are uncanny, because what they do is extend a set of rules or a pattern that began as aesthetically pleasing or interesting over too large an area, too wide a swath of culture.
My guest for this conversation is Scott B. Weingart.
Scott directs the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame; his research sits at the intersection of computational analysis and the history of science. Prior to academia, he was a circus and street performer, and he's still not sure which job is more fun. Scott can be reached on twitter @scott_bot.
It’s the questionable algorithms of twitter that brought me into contact with Scott, and, in that, at least, they’ve done well by me. Scott is a consistently thoughtful, warm-hearted presence in my timeline, and he often introduces me to questions I had not considered.
I’m looking forward to talking to Scott, and I’d love to incorporate some of your questions into our dialogue. Please comment below with your thoughts and experiences.
Ex libris,
Leah
P.S. Kyle Chayka has announced today that his next book, Filterworld, will be a further development of this topic. The forthcoming book will cover “the ways that algorithmic platforms have flattened culture, across both digital and physical spaces.” I’m looking forward to it!
I think what get's me about the algorithmic stuff isn't that I don't like it. If somebody convinced me that a human actually made that, I would believe them, appreciate it, and start to read into it.
It's knowing that it's not made by a human that makes it look so ugly, because suddenly there's no connection to be made. There's no messanger from whom to read the message.
Just like with AI, one could argue that it's also the result of the programmer's efforts, and maybe the programmer should be considered the artist in this context.
I think a lot about what algorithms do to the human face. A number of online resources have popped up that generate new faces.
This person does not exist (https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/) creates plausible headshots of non-existent people—though often with unnerving, warped artifacts in the background. It's apparently meant as a tech demo?
Generated photos (https://generated.photos/) creates stock photos of human faces for advertising. You can order up the face you want by sorting for age, gender, and race. It seems like the more-polished, monetized cousin to This person does not exist. I find it creepy, though of course using stock photos for advertising is already sort of creepy. It seems a little perverse that some company can decide they want, say, a young black woman's associated with their product, and then order up an original, AI-generated black woman for this purpose. Is that better or worse than paying for the image of a real person who has no idea what products her face is going to be attached to?
Finally, artbreeder (https://www.artbreeder.com/) allows users to mash up various artworks and tweak the way the algorithm remixes them. Faces are a big part of it. I wondered if this would be an interesting tool for generating character art for RPGs. I feel pretty ambivalent, however. There's lots of dials to mess around with, but faces end up defaulting towards a samey, airbrushed "sexy" look, like that's what we've taught the algorithm we all want to look like. I've made a couple distinctive faces I like using the site, but I still find it unsettling.
Do others also find these sites creepy?