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Generative AI and the destabilization of cultural objects

There’s a powerful description in Burdick et al’s Digital_Humanities of the “iterative and (almost) infinitely mutable and expansive nature of digital media” which “stands in contrast to inherited notions of ‘writing’ or ‘picture-making’ or ‘printing’ – all of which are stabilising practices with slow refresh rates” (pg 15). Generative AI intensifies this mutability in a number of ways, positive and negative, contributing in turn to a destabilization of cultural objects:

  • The reduction of cultural objects to training fodder, to be hoovered up on mass in ethical and legally dubious ways. There is shift in commodification here from the cultural unit being a commodity to the cultural collection being a commodity; if the intellectual property regime is extended to cope with generative AI I suspect it will be on the basis of the monetary value to tech firms of the scraped data, reflected in the widespread instinct they are currently using cultural commodities without paying for them. The structural stabilisation of cultural objects.
  • The breaking of the link between cultural objects and human producers, through the flood of partially (i.e. co-produced) to entirely synthetic artefacts. I’ve been preoccupied recently by the idea of automated systems prompting automating systems, generating content without the minimal human agency involved in an initial prompt (and the creative/strategic reasoning behind it). The cultural stabilisation of cultural objects.
  • The endless iteratibility of creative outputs when generative AI is part of the production process. This is what I’m arguing in one place is creatively enriching (in the most narrowly individualistic sense) but which in another setting I find deeply sinister, hence my oscillating between optimism and pessimism. When do you know when you’re done? When you do fix upon a particular form for a particular purpose? There’s a creative dilemma here which obviously precedes generative AI but its affordances radically intensify what software developers describe as the ‘get it out of the door’ problem. The agential stabilisation of cultural objects.
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