Toxicity in Pop Culture
Information becomes toxic when misinformation, propaganda, trolling, and AI-generated repetition contaminate the context. Feedback loops amplify errors, stereotypes and hallucinations with or without AI. Algorithmic echo chambers amplify what people like to hear or what platforms and their sponsors think we should. Social media rewards toxic behavior and so does popular culture. Despite their social aspect, online communities can worsen loneliness, anger and destructive tendencies. Recently, a penguin turning his back on his fellow group, walking alone towards the icy mountain, was celebrated as the “nihilist penguin meme”. On the other hand, pop culture kept criticising toxic culture and social injustice often more or less ironically. “Toxicity” by System of a Down, or “Vergiftet” (intoxicated) by Jan Delay even use those words in their song title and lyrics, maybe playing with the famous medieval wisdom that “all things are poison, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a difference.”
Overcoming Toxicity
Naming problems can help to solve them. Maybe that’s a point of pop culture trying to create awareness and share personal experience and observations. Ambiguity is an important aspect of art, otherwise it would be edutainment or propaganda, so the interpretation is always in the ears and the eyes of the beholder. AI art has been criticised for platitudes and stereotypes, but its random aspects and unexpected misunderstanding of the original human intention can bring back ambiguity as well. I made AI generate some surreal artworks based on popular pictures and written notes for this blog article. Asking to pick up the style of other AI images and their retrofuturistic synthwave neon style, I got northern lights that I never explicitly asked for, and TV screens as a critical hint towards our digital online culture and its analog predecessors that lacked any way to answer and participate.
Intoxication and its Double Meaning
Another strikingly cheesy AI artwork, again in purple and cyan color tones and with TV sets on floor, shows a toy robot holding a glass pipe to its mouth, blowing colorful shapes and a neon speech bubble out of it. What looks like a child blowing soap bubbles was an attempt to illustrate the word pipe dreams. A robot smoking drugs a hookah is a possible alternative interpretation of the same illustration.
Intoxication is also a word with double meaning.
Hallucinating chat bots reminded me of intoxicated people on drugs talking nonsense and “pipe dreams”. The act of poisoning can also be called intoxication. Despite their negative connotation, human culture always used deliberate intoxication for inspiration and religous revelation. Monkeys and other animals consume fermented fruits and get drunk from the alcoholic ingredients.
Artifacts and Lost Information
Although our society becomes more productive and creative, judged by the numbers at least, accelerated content creation does not correlate with quality. At least not in a positive way. AI slop is just the latest variation of crap content, formerly crafted by junior copywriters applying marketing recipes to inflate shallow content. Title tropes like “- here is what I learned” or “7 songs that every creative must know” might be telltale signs, but sometimes there is good quality despite the cliché. At least, AI helps to democratize content creation, letting people share their experience and express their opinions who wouldn’t have been able to do that before.
Finding valuable information among the vast amounts of new content becomes harder though. The increasing quantity of content deteriorates the signal to noise ratio, and new generations of artificial intelligence language models are trained on text and images many of which has been generated or assisted by their predecessors.
So-called synthetic data risks losing the human factor and authentic input, disconneting from real life and what actually matters. Despite our alleged productivity gains and technological advancements, society constantly fails to solve humanity’s biggest problems. New technology even makes them worse. Atomic energy was a controversial 20th century technology. Artificial intelligence as a new promise and challenge is already iconic for the beginning of the 21st. However, it might not be here to stay in its current form when you think about flight, another disruptive technology that changed our world about 100 years ago.
Hindenburg and Habsburg Scenarios
Zeppelin aircraft would slowly float on the sky, as they do in alternative world scenarios of the steampunk flavor, if it wasn’t for the Hindenburg aircraft catching fire before it could land after a successful transatlantic flight. An “AI’s Hindenburg moment” is what some scholars say might destroy trust and disrupt the hype. Don’t confuse Hindenburg with the similar Habsburg buzzword also used to phrophecize bleak future prospects for current AI, named after the historic Habsburg monarchy infamous for abundant illness attributed to inbreeding.
The Habsburg effect is more likely. It’s already happening and we can observe similar deterioration effects everywhere. Silent Mail, Chinese Whispers and similar childrens’ games where whispering to pass on information introduces mishearings and misunderstandings while the whisper passes from person to person. The same effect that’s funny on the schoolyard disappoints or inspires in other aspects of life: xerox of a xerox of a xerox, a copy of a copy of a copy of an analog magnetic tape recording of a scatched music record, or a the clunky artifacts that appear when we zoom into a digital image after multiple passes of lossy compression.
This original artwork illustrates different kinds of artifacts, distortion and deterioration caused by lossy reproduction.
I used AI, again, to create a base image following the other illustrations’ purple science fiction style, mixing boxes and square dots with areas of simulated analog noise. I retouched the right half and several smaller areas on the left using GIMP’s Pixelate filter to contrast the clearer details in the center left, before exporting the image compressed with a low 20% JPEG quality to generate “real” artifacts like the ones unwantedly distorting images where we don’t expect it.
Mix, Check, and Critically Observe
If artists and authors keep mixing approaches and technologies, using AI as an assistant, adding their own style, inspiration and experience, and doing the fact-checking against search engine results and their real-life knowledge, then maybe the image above illustrates information intoxication in the future. We won’t lose creativity and information completely, but we will have train our eyes and minds to be more critical and discern hallucination and manipulation from what really matters.
A practical example: according to statistical analysis, this article is 100% human-written. No AI. That’s obviously not true. A lot of technology has helped to create this article, including the text. I noted. I collected. Researched. Copy and pasted everything, asked AI what’s the gist and what’s relevant for search engine optimization. The following screenshot refers to the original English version of this article before final editing.
Don’t rely on AI. Don’ rely on numbers.
We should have trained our eyes and minds much earlier.
But it’s not too late!
Keep creating, keep watching, reading, observing, and always keep an open mind!
