New tech, old fears?

The round table session in last month’s OCA Student Voice Festival that focused on artificial intelligence underlined just how prominent this rapidly-evolving tech has become, not least in an educational setting. Paul Vincent, OCA’s head of tech and somebody particularly well placed to see the finer details of a field that is often considered in very broad strokes, gave an overview of how AI has considerably widened the scope of what tech teams at smaller institutions are able to achieve. Richard Cleverley, the OCA’s Librarian, talked about the pressing need to pivot away from the punitive aspects of AI’s use in HE towards something more sympathetic to developing  and supporting critical thinking. Peter Hungerford, a graduating photography student who used his final three units to explore an interest in the connections - and disconnections - between  artificial intelligence and creativity, demonstrated how generative tools can be critically interrogated as a medium rather than just a shortcut. Even though the session lasted just over an hour, the speakers breathed life and detail into a topic that tends to prompt lots of hype and extreme positions, whichever direction they face. Dan M Kotliar has had some things to say about this tendency for hype: 

In recent years, we have been inundated with reports about the revolutions brought upon by artificial intelligence. Technologists, journalists, and researchers enthusiastically describe how AI algorithms are reshaping the foundational building blocks of the social world. These accounts suggest that AI will soon become sentient, replace biological intelligence, or dramatically ‘disrupt’ significant segments of the labour market; that social, familial, and romantic relationships are undergoing unrecognised transformations, and that the spheres of education, health, welfare, art, or warfare are irrevocably changing due to the introduction of AI-based tools. While AI-driven technologies undoubtedly stem from genuine  technological breakthroughs and may indeed bring about significant transformations in the social fabric, much of our understanding of these AI revolutions is shaped by media  sensationalism, advertising clamour, or, in short – AI hype. 

Even before addressing the issues Kotliar raises, it’s worth noting that the term ‘AI’ is not without  its problems, as OCA alumni SJ Field noted in her Student Voice Festival presentation, preferring to use the label ‘machine learning’. Along with being employed to do a lot of heavy lifting -  ‘artificial intelligence’ describes a lot of very different systems and processes - it’s become loaded with various meanings. In creative circles, it’s often used as a disparaging shorthand for the sort of low-effort, machine-generated ‘slop’ that is given short shrift by unimpressed audiences. Equally, the deterministic ‘machines are taking over’ narratives that can accompany - and also reductively ‘blame’ - much new technology have gone into overdrive with AI, especially as its capacity to automate broad sections of the labour market is on a scale that would have given the  Luddites nightmares. 

While Dan M Kotliar’s observations point to a world that already has an ambivalent relationship with AI, they also speak to a wider issue: new technologies, before finding a place in everyday  lives, are sites for speculation that project alternately utopian and dystopian futures, bringing all  kinds of latent desires and anxieties to the surface. Mary Warner Marien has noted how photography, as well as being an art, a science and a radical means of education - ie, a  technology ‘for good’ - was also seen as ‘a danger to art and a threat to social order’. Much later, burgeoning VHS technologies so unnerved the mainstream film industry - one that couldn’t  conceive of an economic future outside of cinemas - that its hesitation to get involved contributed  to both a creative explosion and the filling of a market void with the so-called video nasties, the spate of low-budget horror films that saw their moment and eagerly embraced home video  technologies. 

In the same way that photography eventually settled into its role as both an art form and essential medium, and just as Hollywood finally woke up to the fact that it could capitalise on audiences’ desire to consume films in their home, we might be tempted to presume that AI will be tamed and eventually find its boundary lines. But this would suggest that all technologies are governed by an unchanging, overarching logic of ‘resistance before acceptance’. Given how directly artificial intelligence targets abilities we once thought uniquely human, does the velocity and scale of its rise suggest that something else might be happening and that machine learning represents a break from past technologies and their interplay with culture and society?