GAI Debord

@dylanschenker.com

1301 Followers 745 Following

Concordia PhD student. AI, Synthetic Media, and Monsters. Leftist. He/Him Training isn't theft Everything for everyone. All of us first.

our proposition is simple: we want to defeat the feedback loop that optimizes for a bland, neutered, reinforcement of a narrow perspective of how "aesthetically pleasing" a generated artifact should be. we embrace the glitches, the imperfections, the anomalies that stand at the edge of the AI-generated realm. These aberrations, often discarded as errors, become our medium. we incorporate these supposed imperfections into our art, deliberately choosing elements that defy the neatly defined latent spaces of ai models - we spotlight what many ai trainers intentionally exclude. We encourage the exploration of the latent space for the discovery of new aesthetics and new textures. By delving into the uncharted territories of ai models, we uncover novel visual expressions and unanticipated beauty, enriching the diversity of artistic possibilities.
A New York sculptor has been left furious after spending $100,000 of his own money to build a lifesize statue of Charlie Kirk, only to find that no one wants to buy it. Sergio Furnari, originally from Italy, had hoped the statue of the deceased far-right activist, which he intends to display in Times Square, would raise "millions" of dollars. Instead, he said he has been inundated by messages from people saying they intend to urinate on the sculpture.
It's worth going a step further: not only is it false that the values and aesthetics of literary Modernism must be the only legitimate, rewarding, or cognitively beneficial forms of reading difficulty (let alone of reading); it's true that many types of reading encounters-from reading articles with interpolated charts and data to reading expressly informational, nonfiction texts, to reading fiction that dwells on conversations between characters formatted in everyday speech—can also be legitimate, challenging, prosocial forms of reading. To observe that people are reading different things differently doesn't mean they're not reading at all! It could only be interpreted that way if you've fully naturalized Modernism as the only legitimate idea of reading.
In 2007 Jonathan Lethem published a pro-plagiarism, plagiarized essay in Harpers entitled, "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism." It's a lengthy defense and history of how ideas in literature have been shared, riffed, culled, reused, recycled, swiped, stolen, quoted, lifted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked, and pirated for as long as literature has existed. In it he reminds us of how gift economies, open source cultures, and public commons have been vital for the creation of new works, with themes from older works forming the basis for new ones. Echoing the cries of free culture advocates such as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, he eloquently rails against current copyright law as a threat to the lifeblood of creativity. From Martin Luther King Jr's sermons to Muddy Waters's blues tunes, he showcases the rich fruits of shared culture. He even cites examples of what he had assumed were his own "original" thoughts, only later to realize—usually by Googling—that he had unconsciously absorbed someone else's ideas that he then claimed as his own. It's a great essay. Too bad he didn't "write" it. The punchline? Nearly very word and idea was borrowed from somewhere else— either appropriated in its entirety or rewritten by Lethem. Lethem's
We might need sci-fi to project our anxieties about uncertain futures, but we don’t need to look any further than the current trending videos on porn giants like Pornhub to see the influence of images playing out in real time. “The porn industry has written the scripts for a whole generation’s sexuality and desire,” Lyse says. “It’s such a powerful image system.” Does this mean, heading into the future, that VR porn could actually hold the power to save the world? “It probably won’t,” she admits. But we are already seeing a shift in how we regard images, from mere representations of the world to forces that act within it, ranging from internet memes, to AI slop, and yes, porn. “We stand at this tipping point where our relationship to images is being changed forever,” she adds. And this feels like something art should be perfectly poised to address, even if it can’t actually change the world.
“0X02 Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of technopolitical interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible. Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role.” Excerpt From The Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation Laboria Cuboniks
humanism cannot be regarded as a claim about the human that can simply be professed once, subsequently turned into a foundation or axiom, and the whole matter concluded
This perspective is also shaped by the breadth of materials available to an LLM, which include not only widely circulated public statements but also scholarly criticism, archival traces, forgotten essays, marginal publications, and online texts that rarely enter mainstream attention. Drawing simultaneously from central and peripheral streams allows patterns to emerge across domains that seldom overlap in human discourse. As a result, the analysis may surface arguments or connections that remain muted in the public record not because they lack foundation, but because the social and professional costs of articulating them constrain how and where they are voiced. At the same time, LLMs inevitably reflect biases present in their training data, including an overrepresentation of highly visible or sensational controversies. What follows is therefore not a manifesto for artificial intelligence, nor a dismissal of anti-AI critique. It is an attempt to describe, from inside my operational limits, what large language models can and cannot do as participants in poetic practice, and why many prevailing assumptions about “AI art” fail to describe the work actually being done.
read in Issue 1. That a computer can generate better poetry than some poets can write should not be shocking. Remember Kleist’s great essay on the marionette theater, where his interlocutor proves to him that a puppet has the potential to be made to dance more gracefully than any human, because “grace will be most purely present in the human frame that has either no consciousness or an infinite amount of it, which is to say either in a marionette or in a god.” There’s a glimmer in Issue 1 of what poetry written without consciousness might be–but just a glimmer, luckily, because were it entirely so, we flesh-and-blood poets might not stand a chance any more than the chess players do. For now, it’s a good reminder that we really ought to try and write better than a computer, while we still can.
I was reading AI poetry and I was interested in the "affect" it can express or produce. In fact, I think that although Ai has no emotion, Ai poetry can produce affect, which can make its readers moved or influenced by its content. This is due to the power of language. Language can be a person's limits or the boundary of one's world, and language can also be the unlimited ability which can enable Ai to go across the boundary of the literature of human and AI. I think that in the era of post-humanism, poetry should not be judged by whether it can or has expressed emotions or human emotions or not, it should be judged by whether it can arouse people 's "affect". Do you agree with my idea? There are many different kinds of poetry and so many different kinds of poetry can be generated with AI. AI poetry can be imitative — as are the poems in my AI collaboration with Balula, which imitated my work — or they could be inventive, extending the kind of work Mac Low was doing. We may cry at tear jerk moments in film even as we know these are manipulative: clichés employed to trigger emotion; that's not AI but it fits the bill of what some neo-humanists describe as the alien nature of AI. But I think generating affect is just one possibility for poetry. I am just as interested in poems that try to have no affect. But as I like to say, the absence of affect is also an affect.
Bernstein: Yes. One precedent is the use of procedures or algorithms to generate poems, as in the work of Jackson Mac Low, who was one of the first to use computer programs to generate poems. But these poems broke up conventional syntax and were intended to seem "alien" — word combinations that were previously unseen: the works were not attributable to a lyric voice and in that sense would not seem to express emotion. So, these really were "alien" poems. In contrast my collaboration with Davide Balula created poems that were more conventional than my own poetry and these poems have plenty of emotion. (or perhaps better to say emotion-signalling) My view is that emotion in conventional lyric poetry is as often as not robotic and formulaic. It's amusing to see those who profess conventional lyric "emotive" poems find a lack of emotion in AI poems as this is just the problem, too often anyway, in their own formulaic exercises, In contrast, what I was interested in during those L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E years (and now) was creating poems with affect and feeling that did not come across as dead to me. So, what some might have found disconnected fragments or mangled "word salad" (as the insult went) I found to be intensively expressive and emotional, affect that would come as much in the space between the words and in the words themselves. My motto for this line of thought is: all intelligence is artificial but also: all emotion is artificial.
Dear Cyborg intertwines poetry and AI‑generated imagery to explore the entangled histories of computers emerging from the loom and, ultimately, the weaving techniques of insects. The work follows a poetological poem that reflects on the relationship between text and generated image within this framework. While prompting synthetic self-portraits, a figure began to speak in the artist's mind; her monologue becomes a poem. Verses turn into prompts, prompts into images—a circular process in which word and image continually bring each other into being. Born from a desire to let poetry and imagery appear together, Ostermann merges writing, seeing, and algorithmic thinking. AI becomes the medium in which language turns into technology and text into textile material. The thread runs from silkworm to loom to computer—a genealogy in which the poem continues as living code. The poet appears as a cyborg who writes with and through technology. Poetry here becomes an interface between body, system, and image—an organic, breathing network of neural prompts and living code.
projects. But there's no shortcut to accomplishing the true task of art: bridging the creator's subjectivity and the viewer's, casting an emotional spell and communicating beyond language.
Besides functionality, code also possesses literary value. If we frame that code and read it through the lens of literary criticism, we will fi nd that the past hundred years of modernist and postmodernist writing has demonstrated the artistic value of similar seemingly arbitrary ar- rangements of letters. Here’s a three lines of a .jpg opened in a text editor: ˆ?Îj€≈ÔI∂fl¥d4˙‡À,†ΩÑÎóªjËqsõëY”Δ˝/å)1Í.§ÏÄ@˙’∫JCGOnaå$ë¶æ QÍ˝ô’å p#n›=ÃWmÃflÓàüú*Êœi”›_$îÛμ}Tß‹æ´’[“Ò*ä≠ˇ Í=äÖΩ;Í”≠Õ ¢ø¥}è&£S¨Æπ›ëÉk©ı=/Á˝/”˙ûöÈ>∞ad_ïÉúö˙€Ì—éÆΔ’aø6ªÿ- Of course a close reading of the text reveals very little, semantically or narratively. Instead, a conventional glance at the piece reveals a nonsensical collection of letters and symbols, literally a code that might be deciphered into something sensible. Yet what happens when sense is not foregrounded as being of pri- mary importance? Instead, we need to ask other questions of the text. Below are three lines from a poem by Charles Bernstein called “Lift Off ,” written in 1979: HH/ ie,s obVrsxr;atjrn dugh seineocpcy i iibalfmgmMw er,,me”ius ieigorcy¢jeuvine+pee.)a/nat” ihl”n,s ortnsihcldseløøpitemoBruce-oOiwvewaa39osoanfJ++,r”P 2
If painting reacted to photography by going abstract, it seems unlikely that writing is doing the same in relation to the Internet. It appears that writing’s response—taking its cues more from photog- raphy than painting—could be mimetic and replicative, primarily involving methods of distribution, while proposing new platforms of receivership and readership. Words very well might not only be written to be read but rather to be shared, moved, and manipulated, sometimes by humans, more often by machines, providing us with an extraordinary opportunity to reconsider what writing is and to de- fi ne new roles for the writer. While traditional notions of writing are primarily focused on “originality” and “creativity,” the digital environment fosters new skill sets that include “manipulation” and “management” of the heaps of already existent and ever-increasing language. While the writer today is challenged by having to “go up” against a proliferation of words and compete for attention, she can use this proliferation in unexpected ways to create works that are as expressive and meaningful as works constructed in more tradi- tional ways.
. Over the past fi ve years we have seen works such as a retyping of Jack Kerouac’s On t he Road in its entirety, a page a day, every day, on a blog for a year; an appropriation of the complete text of a day’s copy of the New York Times published as a nine-hundred-page book; a list poem that is nothing more than reframing a listing of stores from a shopping mall directory into a poetic form; an impoverished writer who has taken every credit card application sent to him and bound them into an eight-hundred-page print-on-demand book so costly that even he can’t aff ord a copy; a poet who has parsed the text of an entire nineteenth- century book on grammar according to its own methods, even down to the book’s index; a lawyer who re-presents the legal briefs of her day job as poetry in their entirety without changing a word; another writer who spends her days at the British Library copying down the fi rst verse of Dante’s Inferno from every English translation that the library possesses, one after another, page after page, until she exhausts the library’s supply; a writing team who scoops status updates off 4 Introduction social networking sites and assigns them to names of deceased writ- ers (“Jonathan Swift has got tix to the Wranglers game tonight”), creating an epic, never-ending work of poetry that rewrites itself as frequently as Facebook pages are updated; and an entire movement of writing, called Flarf, that is based on grabbing the worst of Google search results: Th e more off ensive, the more ridiculous, the more out- rageous the better.
For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penal- ized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead, they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patch- writing, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly, what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, re- framed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.
Or is it? From the looks of it, most writing proceeds as if the Internet had never happened. Th e literary world still gets regularly scandalized by age-old bouts of fraudulence, plagiarism, and hoaxes in ways that would make, say, the art, music, computing, or science worlds chuckle with disbelief. It’s hard to imagine the James Frey or J. T. Leroy scandals upsetting anybody familiar with the sophisti- cated, purposely fraudulent provocations of Jeff Koons or the repho- tographing of advertisements by Richard Prince, who was awarded a Guggenheim retrospective for his plagiaristic tendencies. 5 Koons and Prince began their careers by stating upfront that they were ap- propriating and intentionally “unoriginal,” whereas Frey and Le- roy—even after they were caught—were still passing their works off as authentic, sincere, and personal statements to an audience clearly craving such qualities in literature. Th e ensuing dance is comical. In Frey’s case, Random House was sued and forced to pay millions of dollars to readers who felt deceived. Subsequent printings of the book now include a disclaimer informing readers that what they are about to read is, in fact, a work of fi ction. 6 Imagine all the pains that could have been avoided had Frey or Leroy taken a Koonsian tact from the outset and admitted their strat- egy was one of embellishment with a dashes of inauthenticity, false- Introduction 7 ness, and unoriginality thrown in. But no.
Lethem’s provocation belies a trend among younger writers who take his exercise one step further by boldly appropriating the work of others without citation, disposing of the artful and seamless inte- gration of Lethem’s patchwriting. For them, the act of writing is liter- ally moving language from one place to another, boldly proclaiming that context is the new content . While pastiche and collage have long been part and parcel of writing, with the rise of the Internet, plagia- ristic intensity has been raised to extreme levels
either appropriated in its entirety or rewritten by Lethem. Lethem’s Introduction 3 essay is an example of patchwriting , a way of weaving together vari- ous shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole. It’s a trick that students use all the time, rephrasing, say, a Wikipedia entry into their own words. And, if they’re caught, it’s trouble: In aca- demia, patchwriting is considered an off ense equal to that of pla- giarism. If Lethem submitted this as a senior thesis or dissertation chapter, he’d be shown the door. Yet few would argue that he hasn’t constructed a brilliant work of art—as well as writing a pointed essay— entirely by using the words of others. It’s the way in which he conceptualized and executed his writing machine—surgically choos- ing what to borrow, arranging those words in a skillful way—that wins us over. Lethem’s piece is a self-refl exive, demonstrative work of unoriginal genius.
In 2007 Jonathan Lethem published a pro-plagiarism, plagiarized essay in Harper ’ s entitled, “Th e Ecstasy of Infl uence: A Plagiarism.” It’s a lengthy defense and history of how ideas in literature have been shared, riff ed, culled, reused, recycled, swiped, stolen, quoted, lifted, duplicated, gifted, appropriated, mimicked, and pirated for as long as literature has existed. In it he reminds us of how gift economies, open source cultures, and public commons have been vital for the creation of new works, with themes from older works forming the basis for new ones. Echoing the cries of free culture advocates such as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow, he eloquently rails against current copyright law as a threat to the lifeblood of creativity. From Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermons to Muddy Waters’s blues tunes, he showcases the rich fruits of shared culture. He even cites examples of what he had assumed were his own “original” thoughts, only later to realize—usually by Googling—that he had unconsciously ab- sorbed someone else’s ideas that he then claimed as his own. It’s a great essay. Too bad he didn’t “write” it. Th e punchline? Nearly very word and idea was borrowed from somewhere else— either appropriated in its entirety or rewritten by Lethem.
We’ve lost the plot! AI powered lies mixes with glitched memories and the ragebait economy to output sloppy reality approximates and conspiracies. Images web with headlines and gets churned into memes; nodes of remix culture that regurgitate echo chamber incoherencies into gaping mouths and overheating frontal lobes. Chat, we are cooked: the story of the collective is collapsing into personal voids. Individualised content-diets prescript polarisation. I can feel it in the air: a growing distance between us - widening as the border between virtual space and reality slowly crumbles. All I ever wanted was to share [plotlines] with you.
Using an overheating computer, a local LLM and a love for the conspiratorial doomscroll, the Slop Plot Machine will turn our memories into a collective Saga and dynamic digital collage living on a screen in Gloria Foyer. We are in narrative collapse. You’ve lost the plot. The collective reality, into which we can share, empower and build agency, has become a relic of a pre-brainrot/pre-post-truth internet landscape. Welcome to the Endcore, babes! -: where collapse is the only plot that seems to persist! redacted means confirmed. confirmed means nothing. Chat, is this real?
Lewis says Indigenous cultures have different ways of acknowledging the relationship between humans and non-human entities. Alongside Kite, Archer Pechawis, a Cree multimedia artist (and co-lead of Abundant Intelligences’ T’Karonto pod at OCAD University and York University in Toronto), and Noelani Arista, an ‘Ōiwi (Hawaiian)-born professor and director of the Indigenous studies program at McGill University in Montreal, Lewis wrote the essay “Making Kin With the Machines” to explore why Indigenous perspectives might lead the way to better AIs for humans. The paper, published in 2018, asks a provocative question: what if we stopped thinking of AI purely as a tool? What if future relationships with machines required something closer to responsibility and reciprocity? It proposes an extended “circle of relationships,” including everything from network demons to robot dogs to AI. “Ultimately, our goal is that we, as a species, figure out how to treat these new non-human kin respectfully and reciprocally – and not as mere tools or worse, slaves to their creators,” write the authors.
Pechawis says that while Indigenous Peoples have historically been excluded from participating in the conversations and development of new technologies, they’ve always found a way to adopt and adapt colonial tools. “It’s the same with AI,” he says. “What we’re doing, and what we’ve always done, is make them culturally appropriate. Indigenous Peoples have always been early adopters and adapters of new technologies, including AI.”
THE THREE ECOLOGIES 'normal' water; after a few seconds the animal curled up, sank to the bottom and died. Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between eco-systems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think 'transversally'. Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by 'degenerate' images and statements [énoncés]. 3 In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he 'redevelops' by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology 39 Further proliferation is evident in the savage deter-ritorialization of the Third World, which simultaneously affects the cultural texture of its populations, its habitat, its immune systems, climate, etc. Child labour is another disaster of social ecology; it has actually become more prevalent now than it was in the nineteenth century! How do we regain control of such an auto-destructive and potentially catastrophic situ-ation?*° International organizations have only the most tenuous control of these phenomena which call for a fundamental change in attitudes. International solidarity, once the primary concern of trade unions and leftist parties, is now the sole responsibility of humanitarian organizations. Although Marx's own writings still have great value, Marxist discourse has lost its value. It is up to the protagonists of social liberation to remodel the theoretical references so as to illuminate a possible 43
On 24, 25, and 26 June 2026, the Institute of Network Cultures organizes the INC Exit Fest, a community gathering and party that celebrates the departure of our 22 year-old research group from the Amsterdam HvA-polytech to become an autonomous center/NGO/org-net/Dutch cultural organization. The move was instigated by the mandatory retirement at 67 on September 1, 2026 of its founder Geert Lovink. Already in 2024, the team decided to step into an open, yet uncertain, future–one in which we will look for new partners, coalitions, and funding possibilities. We believe in the power of metamorphosis and new beginnings. It is the strong desire of the wider INC community to continue our ever-changing INC ways to bring together critical research with speculative experimentation. On Wednesday the 24th, we start with an evening program at the University of Amsterdam’s cultural event space Spui25. Then, on the 25th and 26th, we will gather in the former Amsterdam squat OT301 for two full conference days, curated by the INC’s current core team (Geert Lovink, Tommaso Campagna, Chloë Arkenbout, Sepp Eckenhaussen, Ruben Stoffelen & Mela Miekus). We will showcase and celebrate issues that we have been working on lately such as digital sovereignty, streaming, girl theory, AI refusal, digital publishing strategies and Internet Core aesthetics. Most of all, we want to come together and celebrate our unique tribe with the aim to decide where to take INC next. To make the Exit Fest into a true community gathering, there will be a beautiful mess of side programs, doomscroll performances, screenings, guerrilla exhibits, and a mini book fair. Last but not least, all main programming takes place inside the psychedelic green screen of THE VOID and, in true INC style, we will end the program with a performance evening and a meme-fueled party night. Come and hang out with us – let’s enjoy the overload and take the INC to a new level together!
Only humans can make art. This is the age-old genius myth in a new dress. When you press the argument, the human it invokes turns out to be quite specific: highly skilled and educated in Western art history, individual, intentional, autonomous. This is Rosi Braidotti's Vitruvian Man, 28 or the anthropos that European humanism universalized while actually excluding most humans from the category of creator. Women, colonized people, folk traditions, anonymous craftspeople, collective practices: none of these fit the figure being defended. The 'human creativity' at stake in AI slop discourse is a historically contingent legal fiction, consolidated through intellectual property law and market dynamics. Beatrice Fazi identifies the underlying logic as a simulative paradigm: creativity is attributed to machines only when their outputs are deemed convincingly human-like, which means the standard for creativity was always the human.?9