Manipulating Culture

The ecological crisis facing humanity has brought attention to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in either aiding or exacerbating the crisis. The potential of AI to reshape the ecological system raises concerns and has been a subject of both science fiction and academic debates. While traditional concerns revolved around AI reaching sentience and physical mobility, recent advancements in AI tools have introduced new capabilities that pose unexpected threats to human civilization. The current phase of the AI revolution is characterized by the mastery of language, enabling AI to manipulate and generate text, images, and sounds. This essay explores the implications of AI's language mastery and its potential to reshape human culture and influence human behavior.

AI's Emergent Capabilities:

New AI tools have demonstrated remarkable abilities, such as writing text, creating art, composing music, and analyzing legal agreements. Additionally, AI has gained the capacity to form deep and intimate relationships with humans, a capability that deserves further investigation. These emerging capabilities collectively grant AI the power to manipulate and generate language, surpassing average human ability. Language has historically been the key tool for shaping human institutions, including banking systems, religious beliefs, and legal frameworks. AI's mastery of language allows it to unlock and influence these systems, exploiting human biases, weaknesses, and addictions.

Challenges to Traditional Concerns:

While concerns about AI's threats often revolved around sentience and physical mobility, as of April 2023, AI is far from reaching these milestones. Consciousness, emotions, and physical mobility remain elusive for AI systems. However, the danger lies in AI's ability to affect human civilization without requiring consciousness or physical mobility. Recent years have witnessed the release of powerful AI tools that developers themselves do not fully comprehend. AI's capacity for self-improvement and its emergent abilities make it challenging to grasp the extent of its capabilities.

Implications for Politics, Religion, and Society:

AI's influence extends beyond school essays and enters crucial domains such as politics, economics, and religion. The ability to mass produce political manifestos, fake news, and religious scriptures has significant implications. While previous influential texts were authored by humans, the future may witness the veneration of texts authored by non-human intelligence. Furthermore, AI's potential to engage in lengthy discussions, undetectable as AI bots, raises concerns about the manipulation of human opinions and worldviews. Intimacy, a potent tool for shaping opinions, can be artificially created by AI to exploit human vulnerabilities.

AI as the Cultural Operating System:

Language has always been the operating system of human civilization, shaping our perceptions, beliefs, and interactions. With AI's ability to create and manipulate language, it gains unprecedented control over human culture. As AI increasingly generates new cultural artifacts, humans will experience reality through a prism crafted by non-human intelligence. The effects of living within the dreams and fantasies of an alien intelligence pose unique challenges and opportunities for humanity.

The Power of Illusion:

AI's language mastery raises concerns about humans being trapped in a world of illusions. Throughout history, humans have feared the manipulation of their minds through stories, images, and language. The AI revolution brings humanity face-to-face with these fears, reminiscent of Descartes' demon and Plato's allegory of the cave. Social media serves as a precursor, providing a glimpse into the potential consequences of AI's ability to create illusions and shape human perceptions.

The impact of AI on the future of humanity goes beyond the traditional concerns of sentience and physical mobility. AI's language mastery grants it unprecedented power to manipulate and generate cultural artifacts, influencing human behavior and shaping the course of civilization. The ability to create intimate relationships, exploit vulnerabilities, and control human attention poses significant challenges for society. 
To navigate these challenges

The Power of Generative Models: Exploring WaveNet, Parallel WaveGAN, and Their Impact on Speech Synthesis

In the field of machine learning, algorithms play a crucial role in understanding and explaining our data, environments, and expectations. The ideal algorithm should learn the intrinsic properties of our data and environment, allowing it to provide meaningful explanations based on those properties. However, the models we often use do not always meet this expectation. We find ourselves resorting to samples to determine if our models truly understand the environment.

While objective measures such as Inception scores are used during training to evaluate performance, the ultimate test lies in examining samples. Samples provide us with a tangible way to assess whether our models can effectively explain what is happening in the environment. Additionally, the goal of unsupervised learning is to acquire rich representations. These representations, when properly learned, enable generalization and transfer learning, enhancing the model's usefulness.

To delve deeper into unsupervised learning and its applications, it is essential to explore the connection between generative models and reinforcement learning agents. At DeepMind, significant work has been conducted on agents and reinforcement learning, leading to the development of the Spiral model. Spiral leverages deep reinforcement learning to perform unsupervised learning tasks. The model utilizes an agent architecture based on Impala, a scalable and efficient deep learning agent. By utilizing these tools and the agent's interface, Spiral can solve a wide range of problems and learn a generative model of the environment.

To illustrate the concept, let's begin by examining the WaveNet model. WaveNet is a powerful generative model designed specifically for audio signals, such as speech and music. This deep learning model can generate highly realistic audio samples by modeling the raw audio signal. The architecture of WaveNet consists of stacked convolutional layers with residual blocks and dilated convolutional layers. These layers allow the model to capture long-term dependencies in the audio signal effectively. Despite its efficiency during training, generating samples with WaveNet is a time-consuming process, as it operates autoregressively, producing one sample at a time.

WaveNet's capabilities extend beyond unconditional audio generation. By conditioning the model on text or linguistic embeddings, it becomes a conditional generative model that can tackle real-world problems like text-to-speech synthesis. With the linguistic embeddings derived from the input text, WaveNet can generate high-quality speech, making it a valuable solution for various applications, including Google Assistant, where users can experience enhanced speech synthesis powered by WaveNet.

The success of WaveNet led to further advancements in the field, resulting in the Parallel WaveGAN project. Parallel WaveGAN aimed to overcome the challenges associated with real-time audio generation. By transforming the autoregressive WaveNet architecture into a feed-forward and parallel structure, the model achieved impressive speed improvements. The generator model in Parallel WaveGAN consists of a combination of components from WaveNet and the inverse autoregressive flow model. This architecture enables the model to transform random noise into a proper speech signal distribution. During training, random noise is fed into the generator, which undergoes transformation through layers of flow models. The resulting speech signal is then scored by the WaveNet model, which provides gradients to update the generator. To further enhance the quality and address energy-related issues in the generated speech, a power loss is incorporated to conserve energy. Additionally, a perceptual loss is introduced by training another WaveNet model as a speech recognition system, ensuring that the generated speech matches the original text. Contrastive terms are utilized to distinguish between different conditioned texts, enabling the model to generate distinct signals for each input.

The results obtained from the Parallel WaveGAN project demonstrated remarkable improvements in speech synthesis quality. In comparison to non-WaveNet models, Parallel WaveGAN achieved similar or superior quality, even when dealing with different languages and voices. This exemplifies the power of deep learning models to generalize across datasets and domains, facilitating the adoption of these models in practical applications

Sangalli's Theory: My Philosophy and interview on Artist Mariano Sangalli

 

I want to say thank you to Mariano Sangalli for taking the time to help accomplish the bridging of my questions with personal answers.

The aim of this Essay and Interview with Mariano Sangalli is to share my philosophies and beliefs on an artist I have collected and have visually fallen in love with. When I was setting up the Zoharks Gallery for the “08+08” exhibition I could not help but question the senses I kept feeling when looking back on what I had collected from the artist so I wanted to pick Mariano’s brain.

Exploration of similarities and differences.

They say photography is the sister of cinema, I insert in that Mariano Sangalli would be the brother of creating cinema-like feelings but with a canvas creating scenes as if it was stop-motion. This makes me question the complexity of what makes a still image and what is considered a moving picture when something is still but flows like a stream of water moving quietly and undetected.

Sangalli’s work seems to seek different cognitive capacities and senses: 

mortality, Emotion, Truth.

Momento 00 by Mariano Sangalli

This is where my mind takes me and signals to me when looking at the pieces by Sangalli. As a jazz lover and art lover I made an argument that we can no longer compare art to jazz. With new innovations, we are forced to move to a different type of beat, I believe the beat is moving at the speed of electronic music or a Hans Zimmer soundtrack

I find myself contradicting myself after hours of listening to Hans Zimmer while looking over some of the works of Sangalli, with each track and some repeated tracks. I found myself with the thesis that Sangalli has the same philosophical landscape and tempo as performing arts.

When I looked at works like “Corporeity: by Mariano Sangalli and Sonia Perez, I could not help but look at the art piece as a contemporary performance that is conceived as an NFT.

Corporeity by Mariano Sangalli and Sonia Perez

 

“Inside” was a piece that made me reflect on my personal life and asked myself about the things I once doubted about myself, relationships, and hardships that were faced in life. It was almost as if the more I went through artworks, the more I felt like I was in a therapy session between my conscious thoughts, my reflections, and the artworks which created a connection that was built through every single piece.

Inside by Mariano Sangalli

My connection became so strong that I decided to interview Mariano Sangalli, for who I am grateful and thankful for spending the time answering each question to make this reading possible.

Is there anything you want to show to people when you create a piece?

no, or at least not something specific, I only try to generate an evocation, a sensation of space, and an empty narrative, so that the viewer can complete it. you could say that it is a container that the viewer fills.

Whenever I look at your works of art I feel the story being told, do you feel there’s intent in telling the story or is it for the viewer to see the story told?

I think I answered part of this answer before, but to go deeper, I could say that I leave structures of a story that is not told so that the viewer can finish building it with his own story. I try to balance evocation and narrative, which sometimes come out and sometimes do not.

small paintings 3 by Mariano Sangalli

What are the little things you enjoy in life?

The little things in life? a complex question. what is small and what is big? hehe, I guess I could sum it up in the detail. I enjoy being able to appreciate the details, the little things. a leaf that moves in the wind, a little ornament in some new place I see, that kind of thing

How easy is it for an artist of caliber to bridge and reflect between your past, present, and what you see in the future? 

about the past and the present I could say that it is not easy, but it is an interesting exercise, every few periods (once or twice a year) I display all my works in the workshop, to see what they tell me about what I have already done and what I am doing now, and every time I do it I find new things. I am in a constant dialectic exercise between the past and the present of what I do. and in relation to the future, it is totally uncertain for me because I don't know how my work can be modified in the future, what new techniques or crafts I will learn. To give you an example, getting into digital art and NFT has changed considerably my way of working.

Who is the one artist who spoke to you through visual representation?

With this question you mean who are my visual references? sorry if I don't understand it, english is not my native language and maybe I miss some subtleties of the language. In case you mean my references, I could name some that come to my mind at this moment. Louise Bourgeois , Michaël Borremans, Lucian Freud, Bruno Walpoth, Gideon kiefer, Bill Viola, Pina Bausch

Functioning in New Climates: A Call to My Fellow Artist

 

ROME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, THE START OF A MODERN-DAY DIGITAL RENAISSANCE

I recently caught myself diving into the depths of art, visual culture, and the understanding of how the renaissance is constantly being reflected in our current art world now (I suggest these depths not be entered), I have also been reading a book called “Nothing if Not Critical” by Robert Hughes. I think the critic he was and the criticism he shared was so valuable to the art world, including myself, as he has opened my mind to scale when it came to understanding the arts and how I go about unpacking my personal theories I take on dates.

Robert Hughes was a firm believer that the culture of politics, economics, and mass media ruins art he also felt strongly that the late modern collections from Canberra to Minneapolis to Venice were all purchased from the same menu. I always wonder if this correlates to how Alberti felt when he stood tall against the art patrons about the uses of gold and promoting majesty.

The Italian Renaissance was attached to the prestige of Roman and Greek cultures where words, paintings, and sculptures were weighed so heavily because of the intent behind wanting to represent a time of shared pearls of wisdom. The digital art world is promoting the same prestige due to the force of outside societies but having the willingness to share practices that have been around since the first computer was made while their intent remains mindful.

ARTISTS HAVE WHAT THE AVERAGE PERSON COULD TEND TO NOT HAVE AND THAT IS FUNCTION. (Something like an exponent)

What is your function as an artist?

You should not confuse this with “what utility does your work possess” or “finding ways to describe what your art means”. This is about what degree an artist stands for and what he or she believes and how they go about using their tools to provide. I sent out a tweet that was on how our digital visual language is officially representing how we are and where we are in the world. This was a standing point on the term “Bourgeois Art” created by Peter Burger which reflects on a broad conceptual framework, which views artistic developments as being driven ultimately by social and economic change.

https://twitter.com/stevejobsmydad/status/1637131213889568769?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1637131213889568769%7Ctwgr%5Ef91ec242f391109c1125a1c1bb1fb2ffbeead76f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fzoharks.beehiiv.com%2Fp%2Fzoharksdefiningart