The aesthetics of AI: from cyberpunk to fascism

Speaker 1 [00:08]

Hi, everyone. Yes, this is the Aesthetics of AI. Thank you so much for coming to this talk. I really appreciate the interest in the topic. Let me quickly introduce myself and my co-author, Javier Candira, who's in Melbourne, Australia, and not here today, but here in spirit. This is a holiday snap of us in Madrid. That's my lovely husband, Andy, who's also here down the front on the left. In the middle is Javier, and that's me on the right, obviously. We've known each other for a number of years. were tech mutuals and friends and general mischief makers. Just to tell you a little bit more about myself, I'm a very technical designer. I've been working on human computer interaction and design for over 20 years. I'm currently the design engineer lead at Pydantic. And I've been doing a number of things around the AI ethics and fairness space during my career. So, for example, I ran a reading group about AI fairness, and we were reading papers such such as lipstick on a pig and counterfactual fairness and these sort of interesting algorithmic approaches to fairness. I've also given a number of talks on the topic of fairness and ethics in machine learning and AI, and I've also compiled a bunch of resources and built a couple of tools. So just a couple to quickly mention are Sweet Summer Child Score, which is, yes, a mouthful. This whole talk is a mouthful, to be very honest with you. And it's a quiz that helps you try and assess the likelihood of harm in a particular automation, particular machine learning and decision system. And the other tool that I show here is a card deck called Ethics Litmus Tests, which is a series of prompts and provocations, which just try and get that little voice out of your head. My approach to resources and tools is to appeal to aesthetics, pop culture, and encourage the development of sustainable habits. That is, to value skill building and tangling in the grey over performative ethics. My friend and co-author Javier Candira has been working in the arts since the 90s. He's been all over the artistic ecosystem. He's worked as an artist's assistant and gallery assistant, a curator at places such as Art Futura in Barcelona or Intermediary in Madrid. That's one of his exhibitions on the right, in fact, and also as an exhibited artist. So his work on the left is in his 2007 game art collection in collaboration with illustrator Mauro Antriologo, and also as an art technologist helping other artists bring their vision to life and also as an author and speaker at the intersection of art, technology, and society. And he now works writing code for a living and thinking constantly about aesthetics and ethics. Cool. Let me start, kick off with a quick anecdote. Several years ago, I was strolling along the port in Montreal around sunset and I looked across the water and I was struck by this really intense apartment complex across the water. The design evokes Lego blocks and shipping containers, modules and modularity. It ties into this ongoing riff I have with my husband Andy about our sector's seemingly inexhaustible love for cubes and blocks and all things that stack. It's hard to look at this architecture and not think of Kubernetes or Docker, microservices or dependency stacks. Yes, you're absolutely allowed to laugh at this. Later, I learned that this building is considered a prime example of cubist architecture, and that in fact, the architect's goal was to reimagine the apartment complex entirely. Specifically, this is a form of cubist brutalism, which combines the ideas of cubism, which is the perspective, the shattering and reforming of perspective, through pulling them out of their classical perspective, and also this brutalist love of exposing the tool marks and showcasing raw materials, often concrete. Brutalism was, as art movements often are, a rejection of what came before, the nostalgic architecture of the 40s, which itself called to a decorative, exuberant design of art deco, and then art nouveau before it. Instead, Brutalism proposes a raw, honest future, built on concrete and unadorned structural elements, celebrating utilitarian strength and social progress through bold, monumental forms. Brutalism was modernism. It described a vision of the future, especially during the 1960s and 70s, that was at its peak of its influence. Let's contrast the vision proposed by Brutalism with a very different idea of the future. These are three iconic examples of the early cyberpunk aesthetic. Blade Runner and Tron are the two films on the left, both from 1982, and Neuromancer, a novel by William Gibson, on the right, from 1984. Cyberpunk imagines a much more chaotic future, one dominated by technology, but describing a society in decay, where the reverberations of the sexual revolution and drug culture can still be felt, where cyborgs, androids, and augmented humans can coexist, and the distance between humans and machine is diminished and blurred. A sort of neo-noir, Cyberpunk is one of the most distinct and recognizable aesthetics in the world. However, if you look closely, you might recognize some influence of brutalist aesthetics in all three of these. For example, the monumental buildings in Blade Runner, or the obsession with grids and tool marks in Neuromancer. So wait, let's just backtrack a minute. You've probably heard this term, aesthetics, before, but you may not actually know what it means. To just offer a very classical definition, aesthetics is the philosophical discipline dealing with the concept of beauty and taste. Usually, aesthetics prefers prettiness, beauty, in fact, whatever the viewer will find visually appealing, Although, of course, these preferences can and do change across history. The aesthetics of this statue, for instance, are an admiration of the human form, especially an athletic human form, an admiration for bodies in motion, the balance between the fine details like the toes or the hair, and the composition of the body overall, showing the strength and the power of the athlete. Aesthetics are not design, or at least they're not only design. When design choices are a part of aesthetics, They are also the impression as a whole, how an image lands in your mind. It's the context and the culture that that image sits within, the ideas and references and how they combine as a whole. To propose a few extensions, aesthetics seeps into other domains, like ethics, religion, or science. Aesthetics are how cultural movements and new technologies enter the public imagination. They quickly become associated with specific ideas and ideologies. Just a little trigger warning, I'm about to show you an image that has Nazi and fascist iconography. I hope no one will be upset by that. If you don't want to see this, please just look away for a moment and then we will continue. There's nothing violent, just as a heads up. To ground my point that aesthetics actually embody ideas and ideology, in this collage you can see how tightly design and aesthetics are coupled to an ideological movement. From the Soviets with their hammer and sickle to Pepe the meme frog, the swastika in parade or Franco's iconic face in salute. We cannot see these images without calling to mind the ideas, the cultural movements, and the politics of the moment. And of course, this is not an endorsement of these, it's just to try and illustrate the idea. So if you're wondering at this point, what does all of this have to do with modern computing, technology, and AI, let's dig into some specific examples. First up, let's compare Clippy and Claude. Has everyone here seen Clippy before? Is this a thing? Yeah, we're mostly familiar. Okay. We're in old room. I love it. Yes. Tech elders. It was a character embedded in much of Microsoft's Office products in the early 2000s, and you could argue this is a spiritual precursor to the chat interfaces that we have today. It's intended to help you use the software better, but of course, it was pretty poorly executed and people mostly hated it. Klivi also was notably not network connected, so it couldn't and was not a surveillance presence. In contrast, Clod, one of these many LLM interfaces that are available today, is essentially the modern, fully realized version of Clippy. It uses an enhanced chat interface, and by that I just mean a chat box plus some buttons and some other things you can do with it, like uploading images. And unlike Clippy, Clod is cloud-hosted and available on any internet-connected device. AI agents want to be everywhere, and they want to know everything about you. On first glance, these two do seem obviously very different. To get into the aesthetics, Clippy uses this concept called skeuomorphism, which is essentially referencing to design of objects in the real world. That's things like paper, notebooks, switches and handles, anything you could imagine. You reach into the screen and touch it and hold it in your hand. By contrast, flat design, which is Claude's aesthetic, removes decoration. Designs are usually vector and not raster, and shapes are smooth and often more abstract. It can also be seen as analogous to Brutalism, as it rejects the decorativeness of the earlier aesthetic. So, some other things I notice about these designs, one is that Clippy has a sort of corporate IT color scheme, I mean, it feels a bit old school to us now, but maybe it was cool at the time, and Claude has what I would describe as a nostalgic 70s color scheme. It's very warm. It sort of almost refers to, you know, like Parks and Rec or like Boy Scouts. I feel like the colors have a sort of 70s vibe to them. And another important difference is that Clippy is presented as quite goofy, even clownish, whereas Claude takes itself quite seriously. However, there are some really important differences between them as well. And sorry. We just did differences. There are some really important similarities between them as well. And I think most importantly, they both propose to be a cheerful and obsequious helper to you. The focus is on you, not on the technology. Nothing too scary, nothing too powerful. They're trying to deflate the fear of automation or the fear of replacement by technology. And just a really brief side note about this. I saw this, and now you have to, too. there's a vibe going around that all these AI logos look like buttholes. Read the article if you're interested in why designers might have fallen down this particular rabbit hole. Let's keep moving. Okay. So, next I want to look at this iconic aesthetic artifact of our time, the Cybertruck. It's a child's idea of what is both good and beautiful. What are the most obvious aesthetic influences in the Cybertruck? Well, the designers told us some of them. They claimed that it has this influence from the F-17 stealth fighter seen here with this iconic angular nose. They were inspired by games and by science fiction and cyberpunk, so things like Blade Runner, the Warthog from Halo, and you can also see similarities to the M577 armored personnel carrier from the movie Aliens. I would also suggest a couple others that the designers obviously did not claim. One is the Aston Martin Bulldog seen down there. It's shockingly similar, actually. You can just take the render, squish it up like 10 pixels, and you've got it, right? But also, I saw an article describing the similarity to this truck from South Africa called the Caspier. This was a large armored personnel vehicle that patrolled the streets in South Africa throughout Musk's youth, and it eventually became a global symbol of apartheid and oppression. This is perhaps a long bow, but I do see some similarities in the ideas there, like the armored plating, the bluntness and the angularity of it. A couple other references. I see a striking resemblance to this iconic building in Berlin called the Mausbunker, which is actually built as a science laboratory in the early 80s where it was experimenting on mice, thus the name Mausbunker. But honestly, most of all, to me, it looks like a child's toy. I'm reminded of things like Minecraft, Lego blocks, and toy cars. But how should we interpret the intentions, the aesthetic intentions of the Cybertruck? It's this, that the outside is dangerous. We are all in a war zone, and the dystopia is now. You the driver need to be protected, elevated, and separated from the outside world. This is typified by these two examples. On the left, a graphic from the opening credits to Cyberpunk 2077, and on the right, this Russian politician, apologies, I'm going to butcher his name, Razman Kadyrov, who is the president of the Russian Republic of Chechnya. He's notorious for a number of things, human rights abuses, propagandizing, and a cult of personality. And to be clear, mounting a machine gun on his Cybertruck is only a side note in a litany of stunts and macho grandstanding that he's known for. But taken collectively, I argue that we should read the Cybertruck as an inherently combative object to the degree that the act of driving a cyber truck down the street could be interpreted as an act of aggression. It's an authoritarian object. It's a precursor to fascism. And yes, fascism is bullshit. I'm pretty sure you're thinking now, or maybe not. And it's bullshit in a deeper sense than most people are aware of. The word bullshit has a specific meaning in philosophy thanks to Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt in his 1986 essay on bullshit. In this essay, Frankfurt argues that bullshit is different from lying. As opposed to lying which has a regard for the truth because lying seeks to obscure the truth, bullshit doesn't even care about the truth, not at all. Bullshit is about persuasion and getting away with doing what you want. Bullshit can be true or false or a mix of both. Bullshit doesn't want you to know which. In that sense, the enforced diversity in the examples of German soldiers in 1943 generated by one of these image generators in early 2024 is a perfect storm of disregard for the truth. These images of Asian and female and black German World War II soldiers are both ethically and aesthetically bankrupt. They look like propaganda, but it's neither modern corporate propaganda for DE&I nor World War II propaganda for the German war effort. These portraits look like propaganda for a bullshit world of image generation where both truth and beauty are the last things to matter. Let's notice together how Italy had a modern art movement scaffolding the growth of its fascist party, while at the same time in Germany the Nazi party organized degenerate art and exhibition denouncing modern art. So one was all for, one was against. Is this a contradiction in any way? Only if you care for the truth, otherwise there's no contradiction. Both aesthetic alignments, that of futurism with Italian fascism and that of the more traditional bourgeois art with Nazis are the same thing. They're bullshit. They're just arguments to score points and promote parallel agendas. Aesthetics here are deployed to manufacture obedience, desire, and spectacle. The aesthetics of the art are the last thing that matter except the aesthetics of power replacing any other ethical consideration. The fascist poet Filippo Tommaso Marionetti, in his Futurist and Fascist, made the claim that speed was the ultimate form of beauty and that a racing car was more beautiful than the victory of Sommetrasse, which is that statue in the middle. And meanwhile, the Ente Tarte Kunst exhibition would have considered fascist artist Umberto Boccioni's dynamics of a football player, which is there on the left, a degenerate work of art and the classical lines of Greek sculpture the only kind of beauty, but it doesn't matter because it was all largely bullshit. The aesthetics of the art were the last thing that matters, except the aesthetics of power replacing any other ethical consideration. The banner from this slide is from an article by Jad Dashan in the journal Art Meho. It's not so secret that futurism and fascism grew together in the first half of the 20th century. also underline many aspects of futurism that echo in today's techno-futurist online culture. For example, finding value in violence, virility, and novelty. Novelty, newness, where have we heard that before? The glorification of speed, using the language of revolution in defense of conservative values, copying and being derivative of other contemporary aesthetic movements, or a deliberate merging of aesthetics and ethics, as identified by scholar Anne Bowler in her 1991 essay about futurism and fascism that Dachshund's essay also quotes. Yes, aesthetics and ethics all mixed up in the same group. What decadence. What now? Back to now. I'm going to present two videos back to back, hopefully, cross fingers for me, and then we'll discuss them both after we watch. So just so you know what we're going to see. The first video is Uber's video, Bits and Atoms, from 2017. And the second video is the OpenAI Super Bowl video from last year called ChatGPT, The Intelligence Age. All right. Let everyone cross your fingers.

Speaker 2 [17:14]

Consider the BIT, the building block of the digital world. It was invented just 70 years ago, yet in its short life, it has changed the way we communicate, do business, and live almost every aspect of our lives. For Uber, the BIT represents our technology. It's complex, precise, and advanced. but when it's expressed it is effortless and refined and if you think the bit is a big deal consider the atom born 13.8 billion years ago the atom is responsible for everything from the BLT to moms everywhere to New York City and for us the atom signifies our rapidly improving cities the goods we move from place to place, and most importantly, the people we serve. Until a few short years ago, atoms and bits existed in entirely different worlds. But then something happened. At Uber, we asked, what if we brought these two worlds together? What would that look like? It looks like this. We are able to create safe, low-cost transportation options like UberPool and UberX. We are able to create efficient and more reliable ways of getting people the things they need. We are able to deliver fresh cooked meals from the most popular, iconic restaurants within minutes. And someday, safe, efficient movement of people and things at a giant scale. Most of us don't think about bits or atoms much, if ever. We think about how to get from here to there, The people in our lives, the millions of tiny dramas that play out across the world each day. The human stuff. Uber ultimately succeeds because we think about the human stuff first. But the way we do it, that's our secret. We leave no bit or atom unturned to create industries that serve people and not the other way around.

Speaker 1 [19:36]

Cool story lady Okay, my wonderful audience, please try and hold that in your mind while we watch the next one which is much shorter. I promise We are live on the TV, Mom. That's one small step. Summarize this article. Help me practice asking for a raise. What bird is this? what do you want to create next okay let's keep going okay okay so these two videos they seem very similar right aesthetically they have almost identical elements the vector dot graphic is this representation of technology this energizing backing track a seemingly positive and futuristic vision of what's to come. They're both a warm invitation for us to join them in this world that they are building, but there are actually significant and really important places that these two diverge. While Uber does focus on tech, a significant portion of the video playtime is dedicated to showing the real world, people, puppy, flowers, as ridiculous as it was, and to portray the world as thriving and beautiful, scaffolded by their technology, but in some ways letting it vanish behind the surface. By comparison, in the OpenAI video, the subject and the hero of the video is the technology. It's the entire focus. All human life, everything in the outside world is contained within the binary lens of the computer. Humans are captured, framed, even surveilled through the gaze of the technology. The storyline is a linear path of progress with chat GPT at the pinnacle, not us. In the Uber video, we are self-realized through the consumption of technology, which is pure neoliberalism. In open AI, the technology is self-realized through its consumption of us. In trying to describe the aesthetic expressed in the open AI video, my husband Andy coined this phrase, the new American futurism. Let's consider it a contemporary ally of Italian futurism, equally obsessed with speed, with technological progress, with historical destiny. Technology is self-realized through its consumption of us. It's a sinister reconfiguration of who governs whom. The final station on the speeding train of history. I'm going to skip this because I'm running a little over and my sincere apologies. I'm really sorry but we're running a little late. I'm going to just get to the data center. So one last aesthetic I would like to offer you. On the left we have a data center. How it's often portrayed at least in the public imagination. Brutal in its repetition, rigidity, and monumental forms with hints of cyberpunk. Data centers are are an ultimately modernist building, the form follows function to the utmost. Whereas on the right, the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, designed in 1938 by Albert Speer, Hitler's favorite architect. While this precedes the brutalist era, you can see hints of brutalist ideas. Speer's architecture is described as a stripped neoclassicism, a call to a nostalgic, perhaps imagined era of greatness, while at the same time removing much of the detail and decoration which typified this era. I wouldn't draw these together as an exact foil of each other, but there is certainly something there, a ghost in the machine. So what is the point of all of this interrogation into visual subtext? The mythology of Silicon Valley is this, a long arc of history bending towards the emergence of a neoliberal AGI, the ultimate value generating machine. But the reality is that the arc of history is bent, designed, created by makers like you, by people elbow deep in the grease of the machine. The vision, the imagery, the aesthetics of AI in this moment, while supposedly beautiful are actually saccharine, shallow, even ugly. And we need to be able to recognize, to name and describe this ugliness in order to be able to build something truly beautiful. In this vein, I'd like to conclude by sharing a short poem, and I realize I'm at time, but it'll take me 30 seconds or so. This is S.O.S., 1995, by Leonard Cohen. Take a time, a long time with your anger, sleepy head. Don't waste it in riots. tangle it with ideas. The devil won't let me speak, will only let me hint that you are a slave, your misery a deliberate policy of those in whose thrall you suffer, and you are sustained by your misfortune. The atrocities over there, the interior paralysis over here, pleased with a better deal. You are clamped down. You are being bred for pain. The devil ties my tongue. I am speaking to you, friend of my scribbled life. You have been conquered by those who know how to conquer invisibly the curtains move so beautifully lace curtains of some sweet old intrigue the devil tempting me to turn away from alarming you so i must say it quickly whoever is in your life those who help you those who harm you and those who you do not know let them off the hook help them recognize the hook sorry help them off the hook recognize the hook you were listening to radio resistance. He wrote that when he was a Buddhist monk and in 1995. So I want you to remember that this has nothing to do with today. And that's it for me. Thank you.

Speaker 3 [25:34]

Thank you very much Again, I'll be waiting for your questions on on the portal and then I'll be asking them out loud. Oh The portal I'm sorry you received an email yesterday about instructions. There is a call thing called Sorry

Speaker 1 [25:55]

Sorry I had to skip a few slides, guys, but I had to. We lost a little bit of time to the Jenga of the chords.

Speaker 3 [26:02]

Yes, in principle, I don't see questions yet, so if you...

Speaker 1 [26:05]

Anyone want to shout out? Yeah.

Speaker 3 [26:12]

Do you want to ask a question? It doesn't matter if it's not on the portal. I can just phrase it

Speaker 1 [26:27]

I think something that you didn't quite go over in this presentation but that emerged for me when I was watching it is that a key part of this sort of new American aesthetic is obfuscation, it's hiding. I think that the key aesthetic of basically every single AI company is a divorce from the command line. They use serif fonts, they're using very sort of soft 70s reminiscent colors, they are really trying to divorce themselves from this idea of a computer because it's so technological. Similarly I actually think Tesla has the same aesthetic thread through it like the Cybertruck is a bit of frankly a boy's wet dream but if you look at their original sedans and you look at that like empty front trunk, they're trying to lull us into a sense of it's a normal car it's a normal car but there's nothing under the hood quite literally because they want us to ignore this quite frankly slightly terrifying self-driving car right so i think that there's like a really intentional hiding of the truth that wins its way through all of these companies that is a very interesting trend i i tried to make a similar point about claude but i i totally agree i think that there's could you briefly

Speaker 3 [27:42]

Could you briefly summarize what

Speaker 1 [27:43]

summarize what it was for the

Speaker 3 [27:44]

It was for the Zoom conference.

Speaker 1 [27:46]

I will do my best. A number of tech companies have been rejecting the command line cyberpunk sort of aesthetic. Anything that looks too pixel arty or bit styled in favor of a more let's call it pseudo humane aesthetic. Is that a good way to describe it? And I totally agree. tried to make similar points that Claude, I think, tries to be very obsequious, but is in fact, you know, potentially already is automating people out of jobs, and is, you know, quite literally a threat to some humans, so that we perhaps shouldn't perceive it as quite so friendly and so cute. And I think also the point I was making about bullshit and bullshit images, I also had some slides where I was talking here about what I've called aesthetic dysmorphia and as an attempt to describe this feeling of when the sort of cuteness or the the sweetness and the ideas of the imagery the aesthetic directly fight with the actual purpose of the image and this is this is very much of a pattern I've been seeing through modern AI companies recently yeah so anyway I I won't represent my talk, but that was, thank you.

Speaker 3 [29:04]

Maybe I can ask this one question that came from . Of course.

Speaker 1 [29:08]

Of course. Slido.

Speaker 3 [29:08]

The question is, what do you imagine AI aesthetics should look like or what should they communicate? Because there are some people who are doing AI who are not evil.

Speaker 1 [29:19]

Yeah, no, no, that's a really, honestly, like, it's an extremely good question. I would argue that they shouldn't all look like each other. I think that the idea of a generalized helper is wildly unhelpful, because an AI should be shaped to a domain. So to try and give something really concrete, if you're building an AI that's about looking up drug interactions for pharmaceuticals for, like, doctors, it should look like something that a doctor would interact with in their office, maybe it should perhaps call to medical references that should try and use the colors and the aesthetics common in a doctor's office. It's not a perfect answer, but it maybe hints at how you can think about contextualizing a tool and making it useful. And just for clarity, I have seen lots of really interesting, useful applications of AI, just also lots of this. So I think that it's possible absolutely to have both.

Speaker 3 [30:14]

Thank you, there's one more question that There's one more question Thanks you for your talk in the beginning and then the question is what are some tools or tricks that you can recommend to? Not only recognize but speak out against say fascist imagery in tech and AI

Speaker 1 [30:30]

That's a heavy one. I mean, I would encourage you, first and foremost, to look after your own safety. And by safety, I mean economic, personal, emotional safety. Like, if you're in a company where it's not safe to talk about this stuff, maybe don't. I think that it's a specific platform here where I can raise the things that I'm worried about, but I don't think that every company will necessarily be amenable to this. And I've noticed a significant amount of chilling effect where people are not feeling comfortable sharing a problem that they would have shared even two years ago. All of that said, I think the easiest way to bring up this stuff in a corporate context is lightly. Maybe be a bit flippant, be like, oh, look at the Cybertruck, it looks like a toy. Maybe we don't want to do that. If you're a bit light, it might be a bit easier to enter the conversation than if you're like, we have to have a discussion about how our tech is fascist right like that that feels like a conversation that no no one's going to make a zoom call for that right like um I I honestly I I feel like for me like when I'm when I have a concern what I usually do is try and reach out to a colleague I know is a warm intro like someone who I know is going to be amenable to having the conversation and try and talk about it one-on-one and then if they agree that it's something that needs to be discussed we will come up with a plan for how to bring it more broadly to the rest of the team so i would just encourage you to go softly and lightly and and protect yourself in all honesty we are in a very frightening moment of time in history i think being here in europe and having mostly very progressive very liberal companies means that we might be amongst the most safe workers in the world but it still doesn't mean that we're completely safe i hope that's something of an answer if imperfect thank you

Speaker 3 [32:17]

Thank you very much, I'm sorry the question time was over like two questions ago I wish everybody a very nice lunch break and I do encourage you to continue these questions and discussion during those breaks