The lens with which I view technological shifts has morphed over the past year. With the birth of my first child, I think about invention in new terms. As my parents grew up in a televised age and I grew up in a platformed one, our kids will grow up with new norms, habits, and social conditioning embedded in the technology their every interaction is dictated by. Using DALLE-3 taught me just how much this change matters.
Art has always sought to freeze a moment, feeling, or zeitgeist in time for later retrieval and experience. This has shaped our culture in ways unimaginable. We have to ask, what has this profound practice done to shape our memory, our worldviews, and our relationships?
In the early 1800’s, the first permanently captured images of the real world appeared. The shock of this innovation certainly woke many up to the potentials of technological prowess. The right to privacy, the ability to document crimes or wars, and the inclination to remember early parts of your life were all invented alongside the first many iterations of the camera. A new generation grows up knowing they can go out to capture and create pictures of whatever they find.
Fast forward two centuries and exponentially more rapid change occurs. The continuation and proliferation of this technology into every part of our society converges around the World Wide Web and the Search Bar. With security cameras, professional photographers, and (most importantly) smartphone cameras, we became awash with images. Google emerged to solve the problem of having to sort through the world’s ever-increasing data. A new generation grows up knowing a few strokes on a keyboard can find them a picture of anything that has occurred in the world or been created by humans.
Fast forward a mere fifteen years thanks to Moore’s yet unfailing Law. LLM’s turn language, colors, and sound into geometry to be manipulated by a machine’s intelligence. The internet becomes the sandbox within which AI plays to create novelty at the whims and wishes of online engineers and once-failed artists. An image that has never existed can be produced from simple language cues as ML improves over months, weeks, days, and prompts. A new generation grows up knowing any imaginable idea can be created instantly from every bit of the historical internet.
Does this make future generations more prone to limitless creativity and less comfortable with the labor of creation? Will it shape our children’s trust in a vital or meaningful photo’s veracity (when any image can be deep-faked and auto-extended to include what was originally present)? What will the culture of tomorrow’s human-AI synthesis think about the way we have used images to rewrite law, history, and life in a pre-DALL-E world?
