Silence but not silent
It doesn't sound like silence
unless you can hear it
echoing down the stairs
Just a few days ago I got a message from my musician friends.
“I sent you a new edit with the Anti-AI-Art snippets. What do you think?”
They had returned from a tour in Brazil with more materials for a documentary they were working on. I had challenged them to make content that would be difficult for AI systems to generate. The point of the exercise was to look ahead to a future that would be swamped with generated synthetic content and to try to imagine what the effect on Culture would be.
My instinct was that there would be some counter-balancing effect arising organically. A sort of cultural overload would occur as people got precisely the videos and images they’d always dreamed of but in such quantities as to be indigestible.
We had chatted about it months earlier.
“The Gen AI systems are stuffed with images of perfect models, sunsets, kittens…”, I had messaged.
“I see…” Agustin had replied. It was a few days before they would leave for Brazil, and I could imagine him running around like wild trying to settle unfinished business. The core of the band Sinedades: Agustin and Erika were going to try to document how people in Brazil lived the sort of tropical music their own band was known for.
“When you are there: can you look for things that are unusual and rich in context?”
“Ok… Context?”, he typed.
On my side, I was messaging while making lunch for my parents in the Tuscan countryside. Out the window I could see the smallest ever bird looking for bugs in the grass, while a feline Zelda looked them over without interest, having snacked on two lizards already.
“Context… I mean stuff that is connected to the world, to people, to the situation, that has a history, a place…”
“Okk. I get it. Can you give me an example with the silence/stairs clip?”
I had sent an example script they could follow. To try to make a video snippet of silence. But not really silence—more like the sense of relative silence. And it would be in a stairwell, with lots of echoes.
“Yeah, if we look at the stairwell example and silence. First it connects to Zé Ibarra, and his story — he writes his songs there. Then, silence is something very dear to your band. It’s one of your instruments!”
“Haha! I like that.”, Agu typed.
“Seriously! I remember something Erika said one day when she noticed other musicians who were playing conveying feelings. She said that they are scared of silence, that’s why you can’t feel the music they make.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah, but also in the silence, or this near silence, you are actually creating a connection to others. Walking barefoot down the steps, sitting on the steps, singing together with the natural reverb. There are lots of ways the viewer connects: physical, tangible and psychological. This is what I mean by Context.”
“Okk!”
I had nearly burnt the chicken while typing. I would get carried away into another world when typing about these things.
When you look at Gen AI systems— sure they have devoured a massive library of human production, but they have also lost most of the context that brought the material into existence. When you train a model, there are few notes on where the photo was taken: by whom and for what reason; when was it commissioned; or if it was it spontaneous etc…
And now we can request almost any image we want out of this decontextualised mass of references. But we do so through labels of objects and styles that have been standardised by diligent workers or enriched by other semantic models. Basically, the rich original details of the materials we have used in AI training are lost.
This sheds light on a large body of work we cannot easily create with these new tools. There are various reasons we cannot generate these materials, but the main one is Context: they cannot deal with the complex demands of a rich Context and the images are born without a story, context free.
It is precisely this guarantee of scarcity for these context-rich images that will drive their value. Because of this, I believe people’s ideas of what is beautiful will change.
A month or more had gone by and I got a link to the work they had done.
“Nice! I love what you did with the staircase. You managed to combine a lot of different things in one,” I replied.
“Yeah, actually for us it was easier, and it works with the documentary story as well.”
“We need to figure out how to launch this thing…”
“Yes, we do!”
“When is your next concert?”
“End of May at the Viper. It’s one of the biggest indie venues in Florence”
“Big venue? Like what? Two thousand?”
“Yeah—invite whomever you can!”
I am linking the video to the piece Sinedades did and I ask you to imagine what it would take to synthesise such a piece. If you really break it down into small details as if you were looking at special effects, you will start to realise how complex connections can be.
What I can see I’ll list in an organised way to try to learn something about what we are dealing with:
1) Physics of the environment: the sound dynamics reverb, and distance while going down steps, slippers on marble and feet on marble. And the congruence with the images.
2) Nonverbal interaction: interaction between two parties that are barely talking, gestural accompaniment to sound, facial expressions representing a variety of emotions.
3) Human personality: detailed sense of who these people are is conveyed through how they dress, move and express. They are congruous and tight across many dimensions: faces, bodies, dress, voices, humour etc…
4) Backstory context: for those who know, they would recognise the nod to Ze’ Ibarra on the stairs.
You might also think, as I am expecting, that there might be a sort of inversion of technological focus from creative production to the misleading simplicity of scenes that are as authentic as this. We will learn the ways to create stories that are maximally difficult to recreate synthetically.
A bit like Sean Pruen mentioned in a comment a few weeks ago, we go to the Farmers Market for the real fresh and healthy stuff. I expect there will be a similar cultural desire for this humanness.
I don’t mean to overly judge these generative tools—I want to figure out what will end up being mass-produced, industrially and what instead won’t..