Comment by Jordan-117
12 hours ago
There's an interesting connection to draw between liminal spaces (especially the Backrooms variety) and the "latent space" concept from AI, both mechanically and sociologically. Basically, generative AI is an industrial-scale blend of almost every image and concept in human history, and within the labyrinthine, uninterpretable neural networks that power it, you can "find" every conceivable combination of objects, styles, and features. It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled by a process that even its creators do not fully understand. Call it a metaphor for how late capitalism swallows up every movement, trend, and icon and churns out endless copies and imitations, each a little more degraded and disconnected from the original intention than the last. Like the way McMansions echo traditional architectural features, but shrunken, toylike, and not fit for purpose beyond a vague signaling at wealth and taste. In a society that feels increasingly overrun by these kinds of blind processes and cultural distillations, an aesthetic that connects it to a physical place (and one that happens to resemble so many anonymous places around the world and in our collective dreams and memories) is bound to be compelling. And how appropriate that it came to prominence not through any particular creator, but through an anonymous post expounded on via the internet.
I can definitely see how the vast spaces "inside" of an AI model (more precisely, the space of every possible output for every possible input) are similar to the backrooms in that they are huge, related to human activity yet impossible for any human to fully comprehend, sort of "haunted" by humanity yet devoid of it, dreamlike, and so on.
The connection between AI and dreams is interesting in its own right. I am reminded of Google's DeepDream specifically, with its bizarre images that yet seem strongly reminiscent of how humans actually perceive things on some level.
I feel that generative AI is the culmination of Baudrillard and Mark Fisher's thesis.
The world we live in is already dead, and we are wandering with its ghosts. After capitalism strips everything off its materiality and leaves only with its symbols, only the nostalgia for a non-existent past remains.
That was good art criticism and insight into the cultural context of the liminal aesthetic.
This should be an essay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
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> Call it a metaphor for how late capitalism swallows up every movement, trend, and icon [...] physical space
I'd like to put extra emphasis on this "swallows": It's not just that a location is generating eerie mimics, like the output hopper of an eldritch factory. The space uses mimicry to attract, surround, and swallow people. We are like insects who cannot quite comprehend the pitcher-plant. The terror and dread comes from an unhappy-medium of partial understanding.
Through that lens, we can see a lot of rather low-hanging-fruit for further comparisons to "late-stage capitalism" or other obtuse and soulless systems we can't avoid.
> It won't always make sense, but everything (or a plausible echo of everything) is in there, somewhere, mindlessly assembled
I've occasionally opined that claiming we've invented thinking-machines is hubris, but we may have made dreaming-machines.
I see parallels between prompt injection causing an LLM to jump the rails and start telling an entirely different story, and how dreams [0] often have discontinuities that only seem odd in hindsight.
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[0] Or at any rate, our after-the-fact memories of a dream, which may themselves be unreliable or fabricated rather than a true record of a past experience.
I think this hits on a genre which hasn't quite happened yet: deguard-railed, presumably pirate model LLM outputs.
Like the early days of ChatGPT when you could fairly easily jailbreak it to ease GPT4 output, I think we're likely to see a whole community of getting whichever of these models leaks to explore the weirder areas of their weights as a kind of internet performance art thing.
I suspect your system being suitably grey market or possibly stolen would be a pre-requisite of such a scene.