When I first encountered an AI Generated Art app, I wasn’t sure how it worked. My students and I brainstormed, questioned, hypothesized. Our theory was that the app was able to consume, analyze, digital art found online and create new work based on it. We weren’t wrong, but we weren’t right either.
The current AI apps are not sucking down the imagery found on the web, they don’t even access it. But AI is being fed and humans are making the menu decisions. This leads to lots, lots, of questions, dilemmas, considerations.
I’m going to ignore most of those questions for just a moment so I can focus on just one thing. Artificial life after death.
AI is currently growing out of the libraries we use for training. And the technology for training AI, for building those libraries we use is becoming accessible. This opens a window that sounds very much like, and yet is different from, a long held fantasy of science fiction writers, one that dovetails with a dream of techno geeks. Can technology assist us in living on after death?
Can a brain live on in a jar? Can we find a way to upload consciousness to the cloud? How different, or similar, is this from the path our ancestors took when painting on the walls of caves? Isn’t it just the same quest?
With so much of our lives being digital does the data exist to build libraries of who we are? Every email, text, social media post, every recipe, online order, prescription, spotify list, google search, we are leaving footprints, wax and pigment on cave walls. All of it is data that could be used to build libraries.
How far away are apps that use libraries that we can create from our already existing data? Are they the future of memoir?
How would it change the way young people interact with technology if they knew they were always contributing to a personal library that could exist beyond their own lives?