Everybody/Art: A Ridiculous Software Project

Have you ever seen a work of art and thought, "I can do that!"?

Well, now you can!

Introducing Ridiculous Software: Everybody/Art, where everybody can art and compete with those so-called artists.

Using advanced AI and the convenience of your smartphone, the Everybody/Art projects will unleash your creativity and let you be the artist you deserve to be.

Start by downloading the first of the Everybody/Art apps, ML Buddha, and create a new new media work of art in the steps of Nam June Paik.

Free yourself, and free the art through Ridiculous Software's Everybody/Art.

OK, now for the actual post1. I’ve been interested in thinking about generative AI from the lens of the ridiculous software project for a long time. I struggled to find the right angle because, as terrible and terrifying as these tools can be, they are also exciting from a creative and expressive point of view. My first attempt, which I will write about next week, was academically productive but not really what I wanted to do with ridiculous software. ML Buddha is my second attempt, and I’m happier about it.

A few months back, in a work call related to something completely different, Rilla Khaled and I joked about creating a re-make of Nam June Paik’s TV Buddha using mobile devices and machine learning. We lost track of the idea until my sabbatical started, and I decided that making stupid stuff was an excellent way of spending my research time. And so, Everybody/Art, Ridiculous Software’s creative lab experiment was founded.

The first and likely only app coming out of this lab is ML Buddha, the instantiation of Rilla and I’s idea.  The idea is pretty simple: the user can find an image of Buddha. They use an image recognition model to identify the presence of Buddha in the camera feed. If there is a Buddha, the user has 5 seconds to turn the device around before the selfie camera is turned on. The app then will play a “soothing” sound and keep the front camera on for as long as it detects a Buddha in place2. This allows the user to recreate Nam June Paik’s famous work in the comfort of their own home. It is new new media art.

ML Buddha is a joke like everything else in the Ridiculous Software project. And I hate explaining my jokes, even this one, which probably only a handful of people will find funny. But here’s the explanation: generative AI tools don’t make anybody creative. They are shortcuts to create bad derivative art that at best feels like a bad joke, and at worst is downright creepy, and probably also several forms of theft. AI tools won’t make anybody an artist, even if they are artistic tools!

Art requires careful thought, taste, and sensibility. None of that is part of the Midjourney models, the ChatGPT prompt interface, or Runway’s suite of tools. With those tools, all of us can aspire to create an evil, derivative, tasteless clone of the art these models contain. At best, all we can create is something like ML Buddha.

It’s infuriating that these phenomenal novel instruments3 have become paint-by-number tools destined to create tasteless Hallmark art. That’s why I’ve purposefully done nothing “creative” in ML Buddha. The code was written together with ChatGPT. The icon and visual style were also created with ChatGPT. The sounds were free sounds created by proper artists and released for free (the artists are credited in the app). The custom dataset used a collection of pictures that were freely and legally available on the Internet (also credited), plus some hundred-ish images I took of a Buddha statue I bought for 8 Euros in a local shop here in Barcelona. This app has used all these “creative” AI tools, and what I’ve done is a joke that only adds to the AI slop we’re surrounded by. By design, there is nothing new in ML Buddha: it’s just a reproduction of an artwork. Worse, it is the technological distortion of a great work by a great artist. It is also as far as AI will take us if we want to use it as we are told to create “art” by “prompting.” That only produces the worst slop, limited to reproducing the worst patterns of the past.

ML Buddha does everything generative AI asks us to do, and the only result is a reproduction of one of my favorite works of art by one of my favorite artists. A reproduction that is, ultimately, stale, contributing with nothing of aesthetic value to the world, becoming the opposite of an artwork.

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1

Since this is a post about generative AI, kind of, let me state my premises:

1.     Generative AI is a fascinating tool. It is a biopsy of our recorded culture that we should take playfully seriously because what it says about our culture is, well, you know. But being able to twist, laugh, and change that legacy makes the tools worth it.

2.     These tools are made by researchers and very clever people who are also responsible for their uses.

3.     These tools are commercialized by vampires and ghouls whose only interest is to amass wealth on a medieval scale, regardless of the impact of their greed on their communities and the natural world.

4.     The only “solution” many of these generative AI tools provide is the precarization of creative labor, whose full-time jobs will be turned into part-time gigs for the profit of the ghouls mentioned above.

5.     As my students Francesca Tremulo and Erdem Solakoğlu argued in their master’s theses, software developers will soon be, if they are not already, part of the working class, along with artists, musicians, writers, and every other creative affected by these tools.

2

Alright, so this is a bit cumbersome to explain, but here’s the gist: in Paik’s original work, the Buddha is facing its image on a television broadcast in a closed-circuit TV. To mimic that visual structure, I decided to use the phone's front camera, so the Buddha is taking a selfie. I think the pictures explain the effect quite well.

3

Yes, these AI tools are phenomenal. They are also environmentally wasteful, a theft of creative work, and deeply unethical in many other areas. One thing does not negate the other.