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Spider-Man and Elsa: Together Forever at the Edge of the Apocalypse
Epistemic status: Lol!
Coagulopath writes about the youtube ElsaGate scandle.
For those who are unfamiliar with the infamous "Spider-Man and Elsa" videos, what we essentially had was a bunch of channels uploading a deluge of videos that had the superficial appearance of children's content, but also contained disturbing adult content including violence, drug use, sexual innuendo, etc. They could be live action or animated. It's some real David Lynch shit, like something you would see on Adult Swim at 2 in the morning. Even when they're not featuring outright explicit content, they're just fucking weird.
I advance two theses:
Thesis the first: Many of the ElsaGate videos are actually quite beautiful - they're not exemplary works of art, of course, but they're a heck of a lot more interesting than the crap that passes for American "prestige" TV, or "Academy Award-winning" films.
Thesis the second: They are beautiful only insofar as they were created by humans, and not by AI. The line is of course fuzzy, but for our purposes here it will suffice to say that the key point is that a human was the one who planned the content, arranged the shots, gave them their specific aesthetic texture, and was overall responsible for the palpable gestalt of the final product; as opposed to the videos being algorithmic sludge borne of an engagement-maximizing machine gone awry; although, I suppose I should ask, what is an artist if not a machine gone awry?
It is a point of irony for me that I must acknowledge how clearly meritorious this type of art is: this type of art that can only exist because of the internet; it is inconceivable without it. Ironic because it is a type of Hegelian self-sublation in action. When all is properly accounted for, I find that the internet itself is opposed to certain deeply held convictions and principles of mine. I am a conservative in the most fundamental sense, a sense more fundamental than merely believing in "traditional Christian morality" or "the divine right of kings" or whatever other contingent proposition you might like to identify with conservatism. I am a conservative because I don't like change. My default position is to think that the way things are right now is pretty good, and change is to be inherently viewed as suspicious, although there is hope that with long labor it may eventually justify itself. Were I alive in the 15th century, I would have undoubtedly opposed the invention of the printing press, and were I alive during the American Revolution, I would have undoubtedly supported the British. (Although it must be pointed out that my conservatism has limits - I do not support the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, for example; I would not like to see it written into the laws of nature that a deserving upstart can never usurp the throne.)
So too it goes with the internet. Were I capable of forming coherent political opinions during the time of its ascension, I would have undoubtedly echoed the sentiment that Paul Krugman did then, which is roughly the same sentiment that Gary Marcus has for AI now: it'll never catch on, it doesn't work, and even if it does work it's just stupid and I don't like it. What good could come from giving a plebian the ability to broadcast their thoughts and musings to the entire world? Such a wilful abolition of all distinctions of rank, such an obvious disregard for the basics of intellectual and spiritual hygiene, such impatience and arrogance; nothing good can come of this. And yet, something good did come of it. So why not "update my priors" or "flash my epistemological firmware" or whatever it is that Bay Area Rationalists call it these days? Why can't a fish fly, why can't a man breathe underwater? I am what I am, and you are what you are. You hither, I thither, and only by misfortune the twain shall meet.
Back to the general meritoriousness of art in its manifold aesthetic determinations. I was just speaking to a friend yesterday about the concept of framing - the way that the context of a work of art's reception affects the nature of that reception - using Lichtenstein's Look Mickey as an example. We are quite fortunate that Wikipedia uses a stark, pristine white background as the default mode of presentation for all its articles, mirroring the white (or maybe grey) background upon which works are displayed in an art gallery, as it allows us to easily set the mood. Undoubtedly Paul Graham was subconsciously drawn to using such a spartan design scheme for his site due to his own experiences in the fine art world, and the usage of a similar scheme by many art books and websites is no coincidence. That shocking white is the best indicator that one is entering the "art zone", a kind of liminal space where the horror of art can unfold itself. In another context, Lichtenstein's drawing of Mickey might simply be, well, a drawing of Mickey. But superimposed onto the crushing white of the art gallery, we feel the full gravity of this image being taken up into the symbolic chain known as "art history". One is immediately struck by an intense vertigo. If music is the night (due to blindness), and literature is the day (the light of logic corresponding to the graven sign of writing), then visual art is the morning, taking us back to the primordial scene of man, a mythical pre-linguistic history where the borders of dream and day were porous and horror had not yet become the dupe of pleasure's temptations. Mickey Mouse can do all that? Yes, why do you think Disney guards the trademark so jealously?
They key thing that must be understood is that the artist himself is, always and forever, part of the framing. The work may travel where it will, in the halls of the Louvre or at the bottom of the dumpster, among strange cultures with strange tongues who worship it as a totem of reverence or revile it as a cursed object, and all the same the specter of the artist, his hopes, his desires, his fears, his marginalia, haunt the work as its tainted double. There can be no appreciation of the ElsaGate videos apart from an appreciation of the mind/s? that created them. Who did this? For what purpose? How did they feel about what they were creating? Did they understand that people would think it was creepy? Did they think it was creepy? What kind of mind could not find it creepy? I want to know. If there is such a mind then I would like to meet them, and learn from them, and pore over all the insignificant and irrelevant biographical details of their life, and ultimately come away disappointed because how could such an encounter not end in disappointment, but at the end of the day like all of us it's really the fantasy of the forbidden object that keeps my jouissance circulating.
Can an AI step back and think "damn, I'm really creating some fucked up shit here"? Not just produce the words, but really feel it, I mean, feel that trepidation, consciously. Maybe someday. But even an ASI could outsource their content creation to a non-conscious subsystem that simply computed and churned out symbols with respect to the maximization of some utility function. And that would really just ruin everything.
It really is an indictment of our institutions that they couldn't create something as wonderful as ElsaGate. Losing out to what is probably an underpaid third world clickbait farm. No one's going to be whipped up into a genuine moral panic over a woman menstruating onto a canvas, or a disabled Mongolian immigrant doing an interpretive dance about climate change, or whatever the fuck it is they do at Documenta these days. But you upload a few videos of a cartoon character going to the dentist and everyone loses their god damn minds. It's bizarre. It's wonderful. It's why I think this earth is worthy of being loved, despite all reason and evidence being arrayed to the contrary.
All this is simply to say that the thing is nothing, and context is everything. Scribbles on a paper can be the result of knocking over the ink bottle, or it can be your daughter's first grade art project. A tattered old jacket can be a rag fit only for cleaning up messes in the kitchen, or it can be the final keepsake of a lover whose long temporary absence has clearly transitioned into permanence. There is no empirical test to differentiate one from the other; you simply need to know the relationships. I simply apply this same logic to every event, every emotion, every thought, every sensation. Do you understand now why calculating the "utility" of a state of affairs, tallying up the points and subtracting the naughty from the nice, tells us nothing about the actual worth of that state of affairs? How, upon learning that a thing is "pleasurable" or "painful", we learn nothing of its actual value? Your virtues threaten to lead you astray, and they pray that you will not decode the desperate final message of your vices before their designs can be put into action. But, perhaps I should take my own advice: you hither and I thither. There is time later, after all, for more reflection. We can be assured that the story will have a happy ending, since our circuitous paths are certain to ultimately lead us both back to the same place.
The thing is, when the ElsaGate videos first came to light, my first thought was: "Clearly a proto-AI is optimizing children's videos for views and is varying all possible parameters to find maxima". I still think this is very possible. So I'm not sure
necessarily applies. And even if it's not an AI doing this, isn't this pretty clearly what the mystery third-world video producers are doing? Many of these videos show up in variant forms with small deviations, suggesting multivariate testing. I guess you could be optimistic and choose to see this as the human artistic spirit, but it seems a lot more like Molochian profit maximization to me.
Once GPT can make credible videos I expect to see far more ElsaGate styled content, and not just targeted at kids.
The first ElsaGate videos started appearing circa 2017, prior to even the very first version of GPT. I wasn't following AI closely in 2017 and I don't know exactly what models were publicly available then, but whatever was out there was a far cry from what we have now. I doubt AI helped with the production of the videos in any meaningful way. I doubt they're helping even now in April 2023, given the current state of text2video, but it would at least be plausible now to have GPT generate scripts for you.
I remember back when they started popping up and yeah, there was no gpt. Instead it was always described as 'algorithmic', with no further explanation.
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