The Allure of Artificial Worlds

摘要

Fig. 1: ‘Vapourwave Hall’, generated by the author using Leonardo.Ai, 2024. Introduction With generative AI (genAI) and its outputs, visual and aural cultures are grappling with new practices in storytelling, artistic expression, and meme-farming. Some artists and commentators sit firmly on the critical side of the discourse, citing valid concerns around utility, longevity, and ethics. But more spurious judgements abound, particularly when it comes to quality and artistic value. This article presents and explores AI-generated audiovisual media and AI-driven simulative systems as worlds: virtual technocultural composites, assemblages of material and meaning. In doing so, this piece seeks to consider how new genAI expressions and applications challenge traditional notions of narrative, immersion, and reality. What ‘worlds’ do these synthetic media hint at or create? And by what processes of visualisation, mediation, and aisthesis do they operate on the viewer? I suggest here that these AI worlds offer a glimpse of a future aesthetic, where the lines between authentic and artificial are blurred, and the human and the machinic are irrevocably enmeshed across society and culture. Where the uncanny is not the exception, but the rule. Analytic Survey The term ‘composite’ is co-opted here from Lisa Purse, whose writings have become perhaps inadvertent champions of digital augmentation and visual effects in film. The critical and academic response to AI media is not dissimilar from that to the advent of high-concept, visual effects-laden, digitally-encoded cinema. An “overdetermined nexus of loss”, Purse dubs the digital screen, “of material presence, of an indexical relation to the world and lived experience” (Purse 149). James Verdon says that there is an incontrovertible “indexical severance when pro- or a-filmic reality is recorded or manipulated digitally” (Verdon 197), and photography and cinema seemingly continue to struggle with this severance. In terms of AI media, though, there is no harsh ‘severance’ with which to grapple; the dilemma is much more existential, in that the ‘real’ of these objects never existed. Despite their often realistic outputs, AI media still possess an eerie, uncanny quality. Some scholars suggest that the result is a kind of ‘haunted’ media: the main thing haunting these new AI images is actually the camera itself, rendered a ghost now by its total absence from the new medium, a seemingly unnecessary anachronism, but one that nevertheless exerts a strong spectral influence on everything that is generated. (Schofield 17) Andreas Ervik also observes this spectral influence in how generation models structure their outputs with a clear predisposition towards older forms of media. Ervik calls these images without ‘real’ referents “views of nowhere”, offering the example of “an ahistorical emulation of the general vibe of classical portrait painting” (Ervik 83-4). This uncanniness persists in abstract or glitched AI outputs as well as in those that are more realistically rendered. There is always some trace of something recognisable or tangible, be that a human feature, a graphical element, or an assortment of colours. AI media, tools, and applications are lingering, surviving, and in the process are changing visual culture, particularly in terms of aesthetics. Shane Denson notes that AI tools and generators are “dissolving the industrial-era wedge between art and tech” (Denson 147), leading to a profound shift in aisthesis: these ... technologies are transforming the domain of sensation itself, opening up new objects of perceptual and cognitive experience, and changing the scope and parameters of embodied relation to the environment. (Denson 147) Denson’s general argument is that, love them or loathe them, the power of AI media lies in their visceral impact, rather than the technical accomplishment of their generation or any immanent artistic value or quality. The outputs of these AI models are received and