New Dark Age by James Bridle

Author:James Bridle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

Creating new faces with mathematics. Image from Radford, Metz and Chintala, ‘Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks’.

In the same paper, the researchers generate a range of new images. Using a dataset of more than 3 million photographs of bedrooms from a large-scale image recognition challenge, their network generates new bedrooms: arrangements of colour and furniture that have never existed in the real world, but come into being at the intersection of vectors of bedroomness: walls, windows, duvets and pillows. Machines dreaming dream rooms where no dreams are dreamed. But it is the faces – anthropomorphs that we are – that stick in the mind: Who are these people, and what are they smiling at?

Things get stranger still when these dream images start to interleave with our own memories. Robert Elliott Smith, an artificial intelligence researcher at University College London, returned from a family holiday in France in 2014 with a phone full of photos. He uploaded a number of them to Google+, to share them with his wife, but while browsing through them he noticed an anomaly.30 In one image, he saw himself and his wife at a table in a restaurant, both smiling at the camera. But this photograph had never been taken. At lunch one day, his father had held the button down on his iPhone a little long, resulting in a burst of images of the same scene. Smith uploaded two of them, to see which his wife preferred. In one, he was smiling, but his wife was not; in the other, his wife was smiling, but he was not. From these two images, taken seconds apart, Google’s photo-sorting algorithms had conjured a third: a composite in which both subjects were smiling their ‘best’. The algorithm was part of a package called AutoAwesome (since renamed, simply, ‘Assistant’), which performed a range of tweaks on uploaded images to make them more ‘awesome’ – applying nostalgic filters, turning them into charming animations, and so forth. But in this case, the result was a photograph of a moment that had never happened: a false memory, a rewriting of history.

The doctoring of photographs is an activity as old as the medium itself, but in this case the operation was being performed automatically and invisibly on the artefacts of personal memory. And yet, perhaps there is something to learn from this too: the delayed revelation that images are always false, artificial snapshots of moments that have never existed as singularities, forced from the multidimensional flow of time itself. Unreliable documents; composites of camera and attention. They are artefacts not of the world and of experience, but of the recording process – which, as a false mechanism, can never approach reality itself. It is only when these processes of capture and storage are reified in technology that we are able to perceive their falsity, their alienation from reality. This is the lesson that we might draw from the dreams of machines: not that they are rewriting history, but that history is not something that can be reliably narrativised; and thus, neither can the future.

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