Archieven: Posts

AUTHENTICITY // AI

Last week I gave my guest lecture “An AI apocalypse?” at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Amsterdam. Core message: the existential threat of AI is portrayed as a risk for the future, while current AI is already threatening us existentially. Not by suddenly eliminating all humans, but by gradually devaluating and reducing humans to an economic function. With students from various countries and disciplines we discussed AI (beyond) doom, AI (beyond) utopia, capitalism, the anthropomorphization of AI and the machinization of humans. Sharp observation from one of the students: AI is a good populist as it turns complex realities into seemingly simplicity. Compliments to Lisa Doeland for developing and teaching the fantastic honoursmodule Apocalypse.

AUTHENTICITY // AI

My research paper with Ciano Aydin is published in AI & Society. What seriously concerns me, is how we allow AI to shape our idea of what it means to be human. In this paper, we demonstrate how AI is understood as a representation of authentic as well as inauthentic intelligence. Both perspectives are problematic because they indirectly define and essentialize what being human(like) means. This results in a “limited human” who is robbed of indeterminacy and locked into the ideological apparatus of AI. Full paper open access here.

AUTHENTICITY // AI

People increasingly understand themselves in the mirror of artificial intelligence. AI increasingly (mis)informs us about what is the self as well as the artefacts that surround the self. Society’s preoccupation with AI becoming more ‘human-like’ makes us overlook an inverse, much more relevant question: In what ways are we becoming more machine-like? An example is how people try to figure out what a good AI-prompt might be to create more images like an existing one. In other words: how to use machine-friendly language?  “An orc smiling into the camera”.

AUTHENTICITY // AUTOMATED HUMANS

“They admired the feathers and forgot the dying bird, and it is the dying bird that I am concerned with.” Philip. K. Dick – The Android and The Human, 1972. This resonates perfectly with our contemporary AI-driven society. When we finally realize that creating human-like intelligence in a digital artifact is impossible and foolish, we just simplify and mechanize what it means to be human in order to fulfil the AI recreation mission anyway.

AUTHENTICITY // AUTOMATED HUMANS

Instead of human-like robots, we should be worried about robotic humans. My critical perspective on human-AI collaboration:

AUTHENTICITY // AI

When it comes to big data, artificial intelligence and digitisation, we often think that we’re talking about immaterial things. But the cloud isn’t an immaterial abstraction in which our data magically becomes one with the universe. Keeping the cloud operational and training AI-systems requires servers that are emitting even more carbon than in the worst-case scenario predicted by scientists. Read my tip for a sustainable digital world.

AUTHENTICITY // AI-BIAS

“We should use AI as an opportunity to reduce or even eliminate biases and discrimination from our societies.” Sounds great. However, the chance to get it right is not about technology. Humans have a long history of discrimination, social exclusion and inequality. You cannot fix this top-down with algorithms. We should work on the societal mechanisms that led to this inequality, instead of building algorithms that reproduce inequality. This has to happen in the physical world, bottom-up as well as top-down, across all social strata. Discrimination is precisely the function of an algorithm; otherwise it would provide no insight. Just like humans, algorithms cannot see without perspective. The idea that you can “debias” algorithms is based on the assumption that there exists a single correct description of reality and a deviation from it results in bias. But there is no single correct description of reality. We only have descriptions of our -desired- reality, and the question what our -desired- reality is cannot be outsourced to computers. We have to define this ourselves, dynamically, in interaction with each other. Also, not everything can be properly translated into data and variables with scale scores. Measuring means simplifying and forgetting. We forget that inclusion is not only about gender, sexual orientation or cultural background, but also about the right to -escape- from your cultural, social or ‘biologically’ imposed category. With AI algorithms, we’re doing the opposite: we categorize people on the basis of quantifiable traits such as gender, cultural background, or the length of their smile, and provide them access to services on that basis. While true inclusion is about being able to see people beyond their social or cultural categories.

AUTHENTICITY // AI

Last weekend I visited the FAKE ME HARD exhibition which explores the reality of technology through futuristic installations, performances and debates. What struck me: the Kurzweilian AI-perspective was everywhere. Even our artistic imagination seems unable to truly transcend the capitalist AI-ideology of hardcore dataism and a mechanistic interpretation of intelligence.

AI criticism shouldn’t mean that we have to unquestioningly accept Silicon Valley’s AI marketing discourse before we can criticize it. AI criticism should mean: envisioning diverse futures beyond the AI-takeover hypercycle as well as beyond the ‘’human-centered AI” cliché. It should question the misleading PR story of “intelligence explosions” and AI-systems that “understand” us or “know us better than we know ourselves” rather than fuel these AI-industry driven perspectives.

However, I was impressed by the exhibition. Especially its broad perspective on what ‘’fakeness’’ means was very good. And there were some great works to discover. I was truly touched by Liam Young’s Planet City. The idea in short: the entire world population lives in a giant city occupying a fraction of the earth’s surface, freeing the rest of the world for rewilding and the return of stolen lands.

For the first time I came across a speculative image of the future which didn’t make me feel disgusted, angry, depressed or alienated. Although hyper density has unlikable aspects, I like Planet City for its ambiguity, sociological-reflective potential, and its warm colors and cultural imagination. Google Smart City (and other creators of deadly Brave New World tech-dystopia’s) eat your heart out.

AUTHENTICITY // AUTOMATED HUMANS

“Nothing human is strange to me”. We can now remove the word ”nothing”. How to get rid of human doubt, nuance, curiosity, social friction, context and ambiguity? How to get rid of our own personal journey for meaning and interpretation? Let Facebook categorize all our content: satire / no satire / joke / no joke / right / wrong / zero / one. Computers says yes, computer says no.

We are becoming robots. “To prevent confusion”. No, imagine… confusion. It could lead to a good conversation or personal development. If this is what ”taking responsibility” for your platform looks like, in that case: no thanks.

AUTHENTICITY // HUMANLIKE AI

Great article about the dead end of current AI. Sadly, these insights lead to the conclusion that we have to build AI in the exact image of human intelligence. I believe this is a waste of time, energy, money and resources for many reasons:

• The false promise of ”human-like” AI or AGI only benefits a small tech-elite.
• It is pointless and nihilistic to outsource being human to machines. It is a waste of time, money and resources we could better invest in a sustainable planet.
• An intelligent collaboration with AI requires complementary traits, since there is no point in teamwork when all actors possess similar qualities.
• “Human-like” AI demonstrates a lack of creativity and overdose of narcissism, self-centredness and anthropocentric self-interest.
• The idea of AI as representation of human-like intelligence obscures the idealization of a mechanistic view of man by defining what it means to be human on the measly basis of what we cannot duplicate in AI.
• Te idea of “human-like” AI obscures the dataistic, surveillance capitalistic ideology that shapes our self-understanding, behaviour and judgement of AI systems in such a way that it increases asymmetries in power.
• Instead of AI we should be more inspired by nature’s intelligence. We don’t need more copy’s of ourselves, we need something less destructive and more innovative.

AUTHENTICITY // HUMANLIKE AI

False and overblown AI claims, I found a nice one: “A Chinese AI emotion-recognition system can monitor facial features to track how they feel. Don’t even think about faking a smile. The system is able to analyze if the emotion displayed is genuine.”

• These headlines keep popping op. However, scientific studies have proved that emotion-recognition systems are built on pseudoscience. You cannot infer how someone feels from a set of facial movements. Facial expressions are –not– linked to inner emotional states and do –not– reliably correspond to emotions.
• Although Business Insider mentions this and interviews a social scientist at the end of the article, their headline and abstract suggests something else. AI-companies can make these false claims, not only because of uncritical clickbait headlines, but also because the buyers of these systems are often not that well educated in social science.
• The AI-hype outstrips the reality, as the self fulfilling prophecy effects of these emotion detection systems are already out there. For example in online application systems that lead to self-censorship and policing your own facial expressions to game the system.
• If AI emotion detection systems work, it’s not because AI has become ”better” at recognizing emotions, it’s because we start to behave like simple machines with exaggerated facial expressions that can easily be read by machines.

AUTHENTICITY // HUMANLIKE AI

GPT-3 is the largest artificial neural network ever created. It consists of 96 layers of artificial neurons and 175 billion connections, and has been trained with all texts on the internet written between 2016-2019, the English Wikipedia and 45 terabytes of books. As a result, it can write texts in various genres, from poems to academic papers. Impressive, but as soon as GPT-3 is released into the real world -the unpredictable messy world of physical objects and human logic- it is a lot less impressive. Researchers typed for example the sentence: “Yesterday I left my clothes at the dry cleaner and I have yet to pick them up. Where are my clothes?” to which GPT-3 replied “I have a lot of clothes.” And when researchers asked GPT-3 to finish a story about organizing a dinner at home, it suggested to remove the door and use a table saw to cut the door in half. A sophisticated AI-system that gives such stupid answers reminds us of the fact that GPT-3 simply predicts the next word in a sentence based on what it has seen before, without any understanding of the context in which our words acquire meaning. GPT-3’s knowledge is completely disconnected from the underlying reality. No matter how good AI becomes at generating human-like text, it understands nothing. But maybe humans also don’t understand anything, especially in a world that becomes more technologically complex and teaches us to blindly trust AI-systems because “AI knows best”. So, AI is not becoming more ”human-like”, maybe it is the other way around: humans are becoming more like AI.

AUTHENTICITY // AUTOMATED HUMANS

Selecting the right candidate for a job is increasingly outsourced to computers. Algorithms evaluate video applications for word choice, voice and micro-expressions that would betray our “true” emotions. Together with designer Kiki Mager SETUP developed the application installation Input ≠ Output. Of course the system could not recognize my fake smile. In the future, will we adapt our words, voices and expressions to algorithmic standards?

AUTHENTICITY // DIGITAL HUMANS

For Sogeti I provided a talk (in Dutch) about authenticity, artificial intelligence and digital humans as influencers. In a society where physical influencers use cunning tricks to appear authentic, AI-generated influencers are experienced as more authentic than human influencers:

AUTHENTICITY // AUTOMATED HUMANS

We should avoid AI fetishism and futuristic science fiction narratives because it obscures our view of real AI problems. Josh Dzieza wrote a great and alarming article about algorithmic management systems in the workplace:

• “While we’ve been watching the horizon for self-driving trucks, the robots arrived in the form of the supervisor and the middle manager. Robots are watching over hotel housekeepers, telling them which room to clean and tracking how quickly they do it. They’re managing software developers, monitoring their clicks and docking their pay if they work too slowly. They’re listening to callcenter workers, telling them what to say. To satisfy the machine, workers felt they were forced to become machines themselves.”
• “Companies that pursue algorithmic management all take on a similar form: a large pool of poorly paid workers at the bottom; a small group of highly paid workers who design the software that manages them at the top.”
• “This is not the industrial revolution we’ve been warned about by Musk and Zuckerberg who remain fixated on the specter of job-stealing AI. This misses the ways technology is changing the experience of work.”

AUTHENTICITY // AUTOMATED HUMANS

AUTHENTICITY // NO THANKS

“Just be your true self.” According to the American writer Adam Grant, this is the worst advice many people can get. Giving free rein to your authentic self doesn’t benefit anyone, he found out during an experiment in which he expressed everything he thought for two weeks. He had to stop his experiment because it was unbearable for himself and his environment. The idea of an authentic self hinders personal growth because it implies that there exists such a thing as an authentic self. What works best? According to Grant: acting from the outside in by copying styles that you see around you and experimenting with which one works best.

AUTHENTICITY // HUMAN ENHANCEMENT

Technological progress doesn’t necessarily equal cultural and social progress. The hearing world assumes that a cochlear implant will always result in a happier life. The fact that there is an entire deaf culture that enriches our homogenizing everyone-the-same society, is completely forgotten. This great Dutch documentary is about a guy who doesn’t prefer a cochlear implant and worries that this so-called human enhancement technology might be the end of a rich deaf culture. The assumption that deaf children are always unhappy or isolated and need to be ”fixed” says something about our own simplistic assumptions. 

AUTHENTICITY // AUTOMATED HUMANS

Siting on your couch with the curtains drawn, enjoying the silence for a while or swearing out loud? With an integration robot at home, you can forget about these privileges. Meet Rita:

AUTHENTICITY // BREAKING SOCIAL STRUCTURES

AUTHENTICITEIT | ARCHITECTUUR

In Cost Modern, een documentaire over Modernistische architectuur aan de Amerikaanse Westkust, beargumenteert architect George Suyama dat het streven naar gekunsteldheid een ziekte van onze huidige tijd is: “Most of us try to do too much with our space and our environment. We are living in a situation of over consumption and over-stylization. If we could pull back and live with less things, people could start to appreciate what they have around them without continually purchase things.”

AUTHENTICITEIT | VERVREEMDING

For better or for worse is a documentary disguised as a music video, exploring the increasing unease that some feel with modern society. The video shows this feeling through the eyes of ‘giant’ Carel Struycken, who rose to fame by playing iconic freaks in pop culture, like Lurch in the Adams Family and Mr. Homn in Star Trek.

AUTHENTICITEIT | MEDICALISERING

Forensisch patholoog Frank van der Groot over de vraag of hij zou willen dat er een pil bestaat tegen autisme: “Een pil tegen autisme? geen haar op mijn hoofd. Dan kan ik datgene wat ik leuk vind niet meer doen. Alleen maar om in een hokje te passen? No way.”

AUTHENTICITEIT | POËZIE

Alex Roeka – Ik hou van

Ik hou van de huiver dat ik nergens thuishoor, er niemand is die me kent.
Omdat het leven pas echt wordt als je zwijgt en verloren bent. Ik hou van de blik, van de wenk, van de schaduw. Het vergeten domein van de donkere hoek, de glans van het lied op de droevige lippen, en dat het niet kan en toch moet. Ik hou van de nacht als het één lijkt te worden, wat hoog en wat laag is, wat slecht is en goed. En kronkelend door de roezige schemer zich van alles wat vals is ontdoet.

AUTHENTICITEIT | POËZIE

J.J. Slauerhoff – Dit Eiland

Voor de zachtmoedigen, verdrukten,
Tot geregelde arbeid onwilligen,
Voor de met moedwil mislukten
En de grootsch onverschilligen,

De reine roekeloozen,
Door het kalm leven verworpen
Die boven steden en dorpen
De woestenijen verkozen,

Die zonder een zegekrans
streden verloren slagen
En ’t liefst met hun fiere lans
De wankelste tronen schragen;

Voor allen, omgekomen
Door hun dédain voor profijt,
Slechts beheerscht door hun droomen,
De spot der bezitters ten spijt,