When we think about AI, we can’t only think of what it has generated. We need to think about what it does to what the world has already created.
Walter Benjamin made an important point about authenticity when he wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” He wrote it in 1935, when he was thinking about the popularity of photography and film, mediums which could fully capture and reproduce their originals. Benjamin argued that through this process of capturing an image or film, some of the original’s authenticity was stripped away.
Works of art, he explained, are rooted in a specific historical context and tradition. A painting in a church or a sculpture in a town square. “The presence of the original,” Benjamin wrote, “is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.”
This authenticity was held within the art’s physical presence itself. The two are linked and inseparable. Benjamin called this its aura, a way of describing an artwork’s uniqueness in the time it was created. When these works were recreated and distributed using photography and film, that aura fades.
One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art
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By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition.
When you take a picture of a famous painting, or capture a performance on film, you lift it out of its context and place it in another. We listen to a broadway show in our living room. We get a picture of the Mona Lisa on a postcard. “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element,” he wrote, “its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” In its reproduction, art can lose its aura.
It is, in other words, not simply the reproduced work of art—the recorded show or the postcard—that lacks the authenticity of the original. It is the original itself that is diminished simply by being reproduced. When a work of art is endlessly reproduced and distributed across the globe, then the unique traditions of its creation are gone as well. The Mona Lisa lacks some of its uniqueness when someone can send you a picture of it hanging in the Louvre on their phone.
I set this all up because I think Walter Benjamin’s insights have become prescient once again in the rise of Generative AI.
We have stripped the web of its aura
When I see discussions of generative AI that center on its content, it usually falls into two categories.
- Its shoddy output, commonly referred to as slop, which has an almost unnerving quality to it
- The originality and the loss of income to creators it strip mines in order to make its content possible.
We wonder often if what is created by AI has any value, and at what cost to artists and creators. These are important considerations. But we need to also wonder what AI is taking from what has already been created.
There is a certain voice that AI generated content tends to have. I think if you’ve spent enough time with it, you know what I’m talking about. It can maybe be best described as a sort of corporate speak, a fake enthusiasm and dryness that always feels like it can end in an inauthentic exclamation point.
What the model is trying to is to reproduce common patterns of speech into a single voice and tone. This has the effect of flattening out the style of its source material. It creates pure “content,” the kind of content that simply serves to pull as many eyeballs to this reproduction as possible.
This tone seems to imply that the stylistic flourishes and unique voices of what it is pulling from are errors to be stomped out and replaced by sameness. Generative AI creates information, devoid of time and place. What might make a piece of writing on the web unique—when it was written, what kind of content it sits next to, the point of view of its writer, the comments, and the very reason why it was written—are inessential to AI. They don’t matter.
But they do matter. It matters if the content is coming from a collaborative wiki or a solo blog post. It matters when words quickly snap from sardonic to serious to make a point. The design of the page around your words help tell the story. The other posts it lives next to enhances its meeting.
All of these little things that are unique to what we’ve made on the web, all the millions and billions of little permutations of websites we have, are what Benjamin would call an aura. They are what make the web authentic. And AI grinds it down into nothing in the pursuit of its content. It strips the tradition and context of what it steals, and in so doing tells the world that the source does not matter, only its utility in some final transformation into sameness. It strips our aura.
When we see all of human knowledge ground down into meaningless blog posts meant to fill the archives of lazy app creators, what does that do to the archives of what has already been created? It makes people suspicious of everything and makes it increasingly hard to accept what you are seeing in good faith.
Am I viewing somebody’s authentic thoughts and spirit transformed into HTML, or is this merely a pale imitation?
When Meta trial runs AI bots for us to talk to, it not only belies a complete lack of imagination and creativity, but it devalues real human interactions on the platform. It make nothing feel real. And I worry about what will happen to what has already been created.
The Future of Content
There maybe one more point we can end on. Benjamin asserts that “to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.” What do we do when what is written and created on the web is intended for AI? How does our writing change with the knowledge that it will eventually be consumed and summarized mindlessly? Will all writing and all information and all creation simply flatten out to content?
Or is there a way to break the chains?
