Reflections:
I came into this project with an abstract idea of what I wanted to investigate. Generative AI had already become a buzz word in the creative industries and in the months preceding, I had been introduced to some of these technologies and how to use them. The subject however was not new at all, for almost over a year now, AI generated images had come to flood my feed showcasing idealised and surreal fashions, landscapes and bodies. The rate at which these images were replacing the content that came before was a clear sign of it’s impact. Images and videos generated through algorithmic training had continued to be a controversial subject since it’s early days. Much of the conversation that I had encountered earlier, revolved around Intellectual property and representation. Representation was an important subject for me, as much of the feed pushed on my social media were that of idealised human forms, wearing fantastic clothing. Most of them White and all of them unachievable. The uncanniness of these images was being bridged with every iteration, but what was not changing was the feeling I got being exposed to such representations on a regular basis. As I dived into understanding where these images were coming from and who was making them, I was exposed to a larger story that went beyond just harmless hobbyists. An article in Dazed magazine talked of models whose likeness was being “stolen” by AI for campaigns without any compensation. Another article in Vice exposed the budding industry of AI voices for dubbing and animation. These and many more led me down a rabbit hole of information on the large scale impact that this new technology was having in every sector imaginable.
It was on my trip back to India, on a night out with friends that we clicked a photograph on one of their new phone. The photo directly taken from the camera had changed our features and edited the lighting to a point that I was astonished. Enquiring on this, I was introduced to a new trend of smartphone cameras coming equipped with AI filtering software. The starkness of the image is what led me to realise that the applications of such technology was not just affecting industry and celebrities, but had slowly trickled into consumer products and was beginning to change the way we looked at the world. My instinct was telling me that there was a deeper story to be had, and led me to research the changing nature of photography and how it was shifting from preserving moments of the past to showcasing moments in the present. The use of editing in photography had always been present, but now it came preloaded into our cameras and if we wanted to change our photos, it was less about imagination and effort and more about selecting from an array of predetermined options. I interviewed a few people who use this feature on their phones and they all seemed to embrace and in cases even celebrate this new ability to present their perfect self. For my respondents, it was increasingly a case made for the embrace of hyperreality and the convenience of a feature that took the work out of lighting, posing, framing and clicking photographs. These rituals of creating photographs has been automated and undesirable traits and events can be sanitised away with the click of a button. Interviews with users and testing with different camera phones led me wonder, what happens when we look back at these photos 15-20 years from now? Will we remember changing them, or will our memories change to remember this time to have been the way these photographs depict them to be?
The topic for investigation had become clear for me, it spoke to the ideas discussed in my box of uncertainties- The actions for an audience, shared cultural objects and the idea of play. What was left was to investigate this large and intersecting subject of social, anthropologic and psychological affects on people and culture. Articles and studies on the formation and recall of memory highlight the fragility of remembering and how our brains piece together memories from stimuli, often resulting in unreliable or heightened remembrance. Other papers from the National Centre for Biotechnology studied how false information and the use of language can affect how we experience and store events and often remember events differently from how they may have occurred. The information was pointing towards the fact that in the future, the life we recall will be very different from the life we lived. Traditional photography was not perfect but it was an anchor in time that could be reflected upon. With the introduction of new ways of editing visual media, this anchor is slowly being eroded and while it’s affect may seem harmless today, the exponential growth large technology companies are making in this space would lead to such alterations being indistinguishable from reality. Currently, media and journalistic outlet are flagging content that have markers of alteration and biased or false information, but this is increasingly going to become difficult as the race for superior and more seamless AI progresses. The stakeholders currently are profit driven technology developers who are increasingly competing to capitalise on the insecurities of the consumer, and media outlets who must hunt down fabricated and altered images to present reliable journalism. The ability to distinguish the application of these technologies is what keeps it’s use, in the political and administrative arenas, in check. As time passes, these opposing stakeholders, one that desires to make the technology better and one that strives to distinguish appear to be in an arms race, the individual user overshadowed by these greater concerns. While the story of AI generated and edited media will no doubt continue on our news cycles, the story of it’s affect of human memory and behaviour can only be spoken in the speculative, based on current research, up until the point that it is too late to undo any affects. With the decade long research we have on social media usage, the negative impacts it has on attention and recall are already plenty. It is also clear that it would be difficult to reel in these established systems or alter them without fundamentally changing the way in which it generated profit for the companies involved. These same companies are some of the largest and most influential in the world, and they are also the ones developing and competing in the arena of Artificial Intelligence. The future of memory, remains uncertain and requires that developments in the field be followed closely so that its larger impact can be guided towards a more manageable end.
References:
https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/eye-of-sun-national-gallery-photos/index.html
https://blog.google/products/photos/magic-eraser-android-ios-google-one/
https://blog.google/products/photos/magic-eraser-android-ios-google-one/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7366944/
https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-effects-of-media-on-memory#1