Eat Poop You Cat: The Humanity of GenAI Art

Rachel Ossip at n+1:

New image-making technologieswhether the printing press, the camera, or satellite imagingchange our perception of the world, which in turn changes our behaviors. The question at hand is: What are these algorithmic images teaching us to see, say, and do?

As of January 2024, GenAI text-to-image tools produced about thirty-four million images per day. This number is still dwarfed by the daily count of digital photographs, but for how long? From here on out, it’s safest to assume that any image you encounter might be generated. What differentiates these images is not their lack of humanity but their intense abundance of it: all the alienated intelligence, historical strata, and linguistic tics embedded and reproduced within them. Each prompter sets off a huge chain of networked collaboration with artists and academics, clickworkers and random internet users, across time and space, engaging in one massive, multicentury, ongoing game of Eat Poop You Cat. Like it or not, we allwhether pre-algorithmic image makers or self-described AI artistswill have to learn to play.

more here.

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