razorsmile :: philosophy//magic //revolution

Category: accelerationism

  • AI ChatGPT describes Deleuze

    AI ChatGPT describes Deleuze

    There’s a lot of chatter around about the AI that is ChatGPT. Rather ominously the website states that “during the research preview, usage of ChatGPT is free”, which tends to imply that it’s going to become yet another paywalled tool at some point. In the meantime people get to ‘play’ with the tool, training it in the process, for free of course.

    Some of the chat I’ve seen about it has to do with writing code. One interesting comment was that if the AI can do the coding, then the task of the human will be to specify clearly what it is that the AI will code for. They went on to suggest that it may be that the subjects of English and the Humanities will benefit in that they’re able to train people in precisely this skill of specifying clearly what is wanted. There’s all sorts of hidden assumptions there, but very roughly speaking, this seems entirely possible.

    Anyway, I thought I’d have a little fun and see what I could turn up. I asked ChatGPT to ‘give a short summary description of the work of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’. Here’s a response:

    Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who, along with Michel Foucault, was a leading figure in the continental philosophy movement known as poststructuralism. Deleuze is best known for his development of the concepts of desire and becoming, as well as his critique of the philosophical tradition. He wrote extensively on a wide range of topics, including philosophy, literature, film, and politics, and his work has had a significant impact on fields such as psychology, literature, and cultural studies. Despite his significant contributions to philosophy, Deleuze was not always well-received during his lifetime and his work remains controversial in some quarters.

    Interestingly there’s a little button at the bottom of the page that says “try again” and so:

    Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who wrote extensively on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His work was characterized by its emphasis on the concept of becoming, and he often focused on the connections between philosophy, art, and the social and political spheres. Deleuze’s philosophy is difficult to summarize briefly, but some of his key ideas include the concept of the “body without organs,” which he used to explore the ways in which individuals and groups resist and subvert dominant power structures, and the idea of “desire,” which he saw as a fundamental force driving human action and creativity. Deleuze’s work has been widely influential in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, and cultural studies.

    And again:

    Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who is best known for his work on philosophy, literature, film, and political theory. He wrote on a wide range of topics, including metaphysics, the nature of perception, and the concept of difference. Deleuze’s philosophy is characterized by its emphasis on the creative power of difference, and his belief that thinking and creativity are not limited to the realm of the human mind, but can be found in all forms of life and matter. His work has been influential in fields such as post-structuralism, feminist theory, and cultural studies.

    And again:

    Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who is best known for his contributions to philosophy of identity, philosophy of difference, and political philosophy. He was a proponent of the idea of becoming, which is the concept that individuals should strive to constantly evolve and transform themselves, rather than remaining stagnant. Deleuze’s work is characterized by its emphasis on the importance of the individual and their ability to create their own identity. He was also a critic of traditional philosophical concepts, such as the idea of the self and the concept of representation.

    None of these are wrong in any sense, indeed what’s fascinating is that each of them pass as a one paragraph summary. The last two have odd sentences in them which might make me go ‘huh’? For example, “his belief that thinking and creativity are not limited to the realm of the human mind, but can be found in all forms of life and matter.” Yeah, kind of, perhaps, although I’d want to ask where exactly the summariser thinks that this belief is evidenced. Or again, when it says that he was “a proponent of the idea of becoming, which is the concept that individuals should strive to constantly evolve and transform themselves, rather than remaining stagnant“. My interest is piqued by the use of the phrase ‘remaining stagnant’ and I’m curious as to how the summariser would evidence this. So I asked. At which point we hit a wall and receive the generic ‘error’ message:

    I am not able to provide evidence for my claim, as I am a text-based AI and do not have access to external sources of information. I was trained to provide information on a variety of topics, but my responses are based solely on the input I receive from users and the information I have been programmed to provide. I do not have the ability to browse the internet or access other sources of information. My responses are intended to provide general information on the topic at hand, but they should not be taken as definitive or authoritative.

    One wonders who gave it the input about Deleuze in the first place, but this limitation is in some ways the most interesting thing of all, since it appears imposed and not essential.

    I remember the shift in my research techiques when searchable text, mainly PDF text, became widespread. I would find searchable texts of books I was working on and use word searches to track and trace a concept or a phrase, adding wildcards to find cognates and variations and looking at dispersal patterns through a text to see where and when it was deployed. This is perhaps little more than an on the fly self-generated index search, so not great paradigm shift. It’s still something I do at times, although less so than when I was first able to do it, as the results were interesting but usually secondary, peripheral or without any great implication. It did enable me to ‘feel’ a text differently, which was useful, and was a way to cope with the tide of texts that can appear on the horizon. Did it make it easier to think about the texts I was reading? Perhaps. It was a kind of play and play is a crucial part of any hermeneutics, as well as any attempt to think, but in the end editing and selecting from the experiments is still perhaps the most vital moment of thought. What to leave out when it’s impossible to say everything in one go is always a central problem and this selection process is still vital, in all senses of the term.

    Will conversations with AI about philosophy, or art, or literature, be interesting and playfull additions to future research in these areas of the humanities? Almost certainly, but unlike getting AI to code – or diagnose illness – the function of humanities research, and of philosophical activity, is not to be found in the results as they stand, in the short summaries if you like. Rather, these areas of life and thought are most interesting when you follow the processes that take you to such claims as can be summarised. It’s the processes of learning, grappling with a problem, trying to narrate a story about a route forward or a blockage to be avoided, it’s this that matters. Just like this initial encounter with the ChatGPT, it’s less what is said than why it’s said that really seems to matter.

  • The image is already fading

    The image is already fading

    This post was recently found in the drafts folder, lost in the database for some five years.  Meh.

    1.

    The image is already fading.  This is perhaps the only thing we might want to accelerate within capitalism, although capitalism is not the source of the image, or the fading.  Both image and fading have, however, been transformed and accelerated, in some sense, through capitalism.

    It is not to excuse capitalism from any of its horrors to ask, as Marx clearly did, what is capitalism productive of?   The horrors are the most important, the specificity of those horrors compared to analogous events in other socio-economic forms.  Of less importance however, although still not without importance, there are numerous other effects of capitalism.  The vampire is not without its virtues.  The question is, is there some virtue of capitalism that we might want to increase in intensity, so as to provide a route through which to escape capitalism as such.

    Roughly, the answer would be yes.  Capitalism does something that must be acknowledged to be a virtue – it makes knowledge productive in a way that is unprecedented.  Science, a concept that is highly charged, is internally compromised by the sheer voracity of the capitalist virtue of making knowledge productive.  A limit is revealed, the limit of the transparency of knowledge.

    The image is already fading.  The image of the human, the image of thought, the image of the future.  Walking down London Road, high on the walls, stands the reminder of a time before neon and the public relations industry, the ghost sign of W.J.Andrew, Family Grocer, Provision Merchant.  Tomorrow someone will discover that the new filter setting on their phone is called ‘ghost sign’.

    There’s a curiosity between generations in popular music.  The eighties and nineties return, like the repressed, in something that might seem like nostalgia, as though there is no future for the past to fade away from.  It cannot be nostalgia, since that would assume there was some time when today was listening to the past, when in fact today’s listeners hadn’t even been born.  It isn’t nostalgia, or any other lack.  It is instead the flatness of time gradually appearing, through the expanding database. Database flatness, edges of the former times now appear as ragged, those times now, those befores, are less partially inscribed in images and data than now.  Yet it is a transition phase, towards the new database times.  (Or barbarism).  Forward or death, yet there will be no more forward in database time, simply coordinate space.  Without the ‘forward’ it smells like death.  The problem is whether the future is a future with or without temporality?  The image of time is fading in the face of the database.  Everything will be dated, but nowhere will time be found. (A new aeon).

    “Is there not already in the Stoics this dual attitude of confidence and mistrust, with respect to the world, corresponding to the two types of mixtures – the white mixture which conserves as it spreads, and the black and confused mixture which alters?  In the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the alternative frequently resounds: is this the good or bad mixture?  This question finds an answer only when the two terms end up being indifferent, that is, when the status of virtue (or of health) has to be sought elsewhere, in another direction, in another element – Aion versus Chronos”. (Logic of Sense, 23rd Series of the Aion, p162).

    The ‘black and confused mixture which alters’ has flown its flag, still flies it, yet indifference reigns.  Even when indifference is not the order of the day, amongst those activists and organisers and leftists for example, their stance is now so hysterically moral and lacking any future as to suggest it is no longer actual rebellion but merely the inverse symptom of generalised indifference.  Moral outrage infects what were once the ‘forces of the future’ with a proto-fascism that will spawn when the conditions call for it.  The demand is to negate the forces of capitalism with the idea of the future, a conception of another world, a transcendence of property and profit, yet without weapons (not words) such negation is, like all negation, hollow.  The candle in the eye of the cow.

    Is this a good or a bad mixture?  The image is fading, time is shifting, temporality undergoing a transition as fundamental as the introduction of clock time and Saint Monday may even make it’s return.  The aion of capitalism has offered us a peculiar time, needs to offer us a peculiar time, at once Chronos crossing labour but simultaneously Aion forcing exchange.  As each moment becomes measured and quantified, de facto, in labour time, each moment also becomes exchangeable, de jure, for any other.  In this tense dynamic the image is already fading.

    2.

    How can we distinguish the image from the event?    Through it’s fading.  This intimacy of the paint peeling, the emulsion yellowing, the edges fraying, the memory failing, this intimacy of fading is in part the ground of the image.  An image that never fades is simply no longer an image.  Yet what if this fading itself was becoming ungrounded, fading out, as we cross-fade into the new form.   The black mixture that alters has wreaked havoc (through the ‘digital revolution’) on the image, that black mixture made up of the bodies of cameras and lcd screens and red buttons, drifting across the earth and our eyes.

    During the late nineties there was an argument amongst film-makers, particularly those who had come into the practice in part because of the digital revolution (the horrors of Blair Witch as symptom).  The dominant position of this argument essentially claimed that emulsion-based techniques were little more than neutral tech that would soon be superseded by the CCD improvements. ‘CCD’ stands for ‘Charge Coupled Device’.  Within digital cameras the CCD is often referred to as the ‘chip’ of the camera, although it is not the same sort of ‘chip’ that is found within a modern PC.  A CCD essentially converts input into electrical charge, as distinguished from emulsion techniques where the film would converts input into chemical charge.  The pro-digital proponents pushed the propaganda that the CCD process was, effectively, better than emulsion because it was more accurate.  Arguing for emulsion was reduced to ‘clinging to a fetish’.  The debate was framed into a ‘forwards/backwards’ push, the digital proponents akin to proto-accelerationists, the emulsion fans converted into something like a luddite technician.

    The real question, however, was always the one of the virtues of the mixture.  The real error was the functionalism of the proto-accelerationist pro-digital fans, the idea that image capture and production was a functional process.  Like all good functionalists, if the process is a function then it is possible to instantiate it in multiple forms and, whilst these forms might have some specificity, this ‘idiosyncrasy’ of the technology was little more than noise in the functional process that could be eliminated in time.  Given the right CCD and the right light the mixture would be functionally indistinguishable from emulsion based processes.  Digital could be made to look like film.  Except it couldn’t, not really, and once that was realised it was soon argued that such attempts to ‘make digital look like film’ were redundant aesthetically.

    The real mixture into which the luddite emulsionites and the accelerationist CCD-lovers were thrust was not driven by image capture and production, it was instead driven by commodities, the basic cell of the capitalist body.  The new digital cameras were a boost in commodity forms, a new gadget to get, crashing the actual cost of image production and capture.   The ‘digital revolution’ occurred not because of the advance of digital technology but because of the cost of film-making.  The debates about fidelity, dynamic range, colour constancy, focal depth and various other arcane aspects of the tech were all strange symptoms of a process that demanded the sale of camcorders.