K Allado-McDowell: On Neural Media

How will AI shape our understanding of our creativity and ourselves? In February, artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell delivered a fascinating Long Now Talk that explored the dimensions of Neural Media — their term for an emerging set of creative forms that use artificial neural networks inspired by the connective design of the human brain. Their Long Now Talk is a journey through the strange valleys and outcroppings of this age of neural media. That journey began in 02015, in the wake of K Allado-McDowell’s encounter with an image known as “trippysquirrel.jpg.” That picture — a squirrel flowing into dog into a slug, a hallucinogenic collection of misplaced eyes and waves of color — was generated by what was then a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system: a convolutional neural network. What AI researchers did with the creation of images like “trippysquirrel.jpeg” was to invert the traditional role of the neural network as classifier: transforming it into a tool for the generation of novel material. The captivating, uncanny potential of these AI-generated images inspired Allado-McDowell to form and lead the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google, and to begin their own explorations into co-creating art with artificial intelligence. Now, after a decade spent composing novels, operas, and more alongside a variety of AI models, Allado-McDowell sees the mode of creativity offered by these non-human intelligences as not just a novelty but an entirely new, sometimes bizarre paradigm of media. Allado-McDowell tells a fascinating story involving statistical distributions, anti-aging influencers at war with death itself, and vast quantities of “AI Slop,” the low-quality, faintly surreal output of cheap, rapidly proliferating image models. Yet even in this morass of slop Allado-McDowell sees reason for optimism. Referring to the title of their 02020 book Pharmako-AI, which was co-written with GPT-3, Allado-McDowell notes that the Greek word pharmakon could mean both drug and cure. What may seem poisonous or dangerous in this new paradigm of neural media could also unlock for us new and deeper ways of understanding ourselves, our planet, and all of the intelligent networks that live within it.