Musings

It’s such a minor thing that it’s probably not worth noting, but it’s interesting that the actual presence of AI/machine-generated media has carved a weird hole in language where phrases like “AI generated" used to be and where no terminology has really come in to take its place. In the descriptions of like, 2015-era PC Music (QT, Hannah Diamond, all that) "this sounds like if a computer made a song"/"robot attempting to process emotions and failing"-ish comments are quite common to try to communicate what those works felt like. What this meant and what they were trying to communicate (that it was a wonky, clinically precise distillation of human emotion that proceeds from some mathematically pure but alien understanding of it) was easily able to be communicated with these metaphors and terms. Now that computer/robotic terminology actually has a real-world presence, one that has nothing to do with the way in which those 2010s comments imagined it (instead of being precise, clean, mathematically sterile, it's defined by this faux-human mushiness that feels nothing like that at all,) looking back on them feels strange to say the least. There's no easy shorthand now for trying to say what those comments easily said; the cultural reference point has dropped out and disappeared (or been murdered by the new reality, basically.)

Inspired by alephnullification's post on Reflections.