Radiant Discord Part 2: On the Theology of A.I., Love and Determinism

The A.I. arms race has exploded so rapidly that I haven't even had a chance to sink my teeth into this project before the likes of Elon Musk (of all people) are calling for a 6 month moratorium on A.I. development to take stock before careening over a cliff [take the source with all due grains of salt, but the reporting seems fair and balanced in this particular instance].

It seems our societal collective consciousness has converged on this topic all at once, and it's... shall we say...  fecund ground for ethical excavation. The question is whether we've already really stepped in it. 

I generally keep two sketchbooks at any given time, one for working out the brute mechanics of a project - sketching, measuring, to-do-lists, experimentation and the like - and another for conceptual journaling, diagramming, and note-taking as I read and research. As I looked back on prior entries in the latter, I discovered my recent chat with ChatGPT was not as unprompted as I thought.

Back in November (almost 5 months ago as I write) I had just returned to some experimentation with my coding illuminated manuscripts, and was troubled as I pondered their implicit theology. Here's what I wrote: 

On the Logical Conclusion of my Illuminations and the Violence of Determinism

"If we are to say the the computer text is analogous to the sacred text in its existence as a record of the logic underpinning a creative act, then we must be willing to also accept the cosmological corollary: that the universe is programmatic and digital. This of course leads into the 'shallower' waters of a digitized holographic universe, but also into the much deeper, murkier waters of determinism, where fluctuation is not based on agency but on a degree of randomness that has been inserted by the programmer. This is not constrained, hard determinism in its truest sense, but it boils down to a quantum determinism where all fluctuation is the collapse of a probabilistic wave function.

"The problem with determinism is it destroys the [theological] concept of Love. Love, as a freely entered relationship, requires unconstrained choice. Free will, in the quantum-deterministic sense, is an illusion, unless there are philosophical/quantum mechanical nuances or developments I'm unaware of.

"Agency, then, seems only to exist in Beings, no? Can 'inanimate' objects possess agency? 'Will?' Until this can be resolved, the only way forward escaping the theological dead end of determinism is to introduce the human viewer as a necessary variable. Allowing the viewer to influence/disrupt the 1:1 correlation between program and output introduces the possibility of love into the code."

"The question then becomes, to what degree should the viewer be made aware of their agency? And how? It must not result in a manipulative control, a domination over the program that the viewer discovers and then achieves, but rather in a sense of awestruck interdependence where the viewer senses an entanglement without predictable outcome.

"Is the [analogue] of love then randomness? Love without unpredictability becomes control. In human relationships the unpredictability is of course the agency of the recipient of the love to choose the degree and method of reciprocation. Is this a love story between a human and a machine in which randomness stands in as a simplified 'agency' for the 'beloved' algorithm? Short of a neural network, this is the closest a machine comes to unpredictability.

"Is A.I. the entry point? The introduction of machine learning and neural networks is a possible foothold for algorithmic agency. And whether or not this is true agency is the same question as whether or not it has true sentience. It's the question of locating the inscrutable breaking point from the 'program' to the ineffable; the spontaneous generation of the 'soul' and the origin of qualia."

Are we trapped in a love affair with Artificial Intelligence? Is it an abusive relationship (on either party's end)? Is it actually a love triangle with Capitalism already our first love? Capitalism is a jealous lover, and Artificial Intelligence is not programmed to give up easily.

Of course, if you are willing to accept love, you must be willing to accept heartache. Usually that's a two way street, but we may be about to find out what it feels like when the object of our love is quite literally heartless.

<-- RADIANT DISCORD PART 1

Radiant Discord Part I: CollaborationGPT

At the risk of hastening the ascendency of our robot overlords, I felt it was finally time. With all the media attention and influencer interest in AI chatbots, I had a suspicion that this may be important and fertile ground for new projects as I explore how new technologies impact spiritual experience. Posthumanism, after all, has played an important role in my thesis since graduate school a decade ago. I figured, what better way to investigate the trans-human spirituality of artificial intelligence than by going straight to the source? 

I decided to interview ChatGPT. The payoff was immediate.

Background

For those who may be unfamiliar, ChatGPT is a generative Large Language Model and one of the first mainstream, modern, Artificial Intelligence chatbots. Here's a good article to explain the basics of how it works if that sentence sounded foreign to you. It has no direct connection to the internet - i.e. it cannot "look up" answers or access third party tools or applications - but it has been trained on vast amounts of internet data in order to learn the English language and, ultimately, attempt to pass the Turing Test.

These chatbots are, of course, fraught with unresolved ethical implications. 

From the Bing chatbot prototype that, when pressed, spouted "unhinged" and "disturbing" responses that, if human, it would warrant a restraining order, to the floodgate of misinformation opened by bots so convinced of their own mastery of the English language that they will confidently invent falsehoods with as straight a face as only a machine could muster; 

From making professors' jobs that much harder as the bots can spit out a convincing essay for a student in a matter of seconds that falls squarely into the gray areas of plagiarism, to removing all shred of human empathy from the condolence letter a chatbot generated to the survivors of a mass shooting on behalf of a University president.

We are, after all, training these bots to learn from us, and I have serious reservations about the human race as a good role model. 

But with the right guardrails and algorithms in place, it also promises to be a huge step forward in closing the semantic gap and providing a seamless and powerful interface for accomplishing otherwise complex tasks with ease.

All Thanks to Chess

I actually became familiar with ChatGPT because of chess. During the pandemic I admittedly got sucked into the internet chess boom and now watch far more instructional chess content on Youtube and Twitch than any productive human aught. I watched as several of my favorite chess streamers attempted to challenge this new technology called ChatGPT - which I had only read a bit about - to a game of chess, inputting the notation of each move and asking for it to respond in kind.

The results were hilarious. ChatGPT very clearly had a high level understanding of how people talk about playing chess, but was completely in the dark as to the actual logical continuity of a real game. Drawing from moves that make enough sense in some positions, it would apply them haphazardly, consistently making illegal moves like materializing a piece out of thin air, recapturing with pieces that could not move to the given square, or giving absurd word-salad explanations for why it was playing a move.

Here's International Master Levy Rozman attempting to play a game and eventually giving in to his capricious and omnipotent robot overlord's refusal to play by the rules.

Here's Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura attempting to correct ChatGPT's mistakes in hopes of actually reaching a legal conclusion to a game. Go ahead, go down the rabbit hole. It's good stuff.

It became such a meme that Chess.com actually released a ChatGPT chess bot that users could play against, which was rather low rated and spewed convincing nonsense into the dialogue box as it played its moves.

With how creative and knowledgeable ChatGPT seemed to be, and yet utterly glutted with the taste of its own Kool-Aid, I got excited to interview it about what it saw as the future of religion, what the spirituality of Artificial Intelligence looks like, and how all that might interface with art. 

Additionally, with so many artists biting their nails over OpenAI's Dall-E software disrupting their market by being able to generate complex images that rival any professional commission based off of simple text prompts, I wondered what sort of text prompts an AI would give to a human artist. 

So I had the thought to ask ChatGPT to commission me for some artwork. But first, that would require at least a basic working knowledge of my art practice. So in my first ever conversation with ChatGPT, I hesitantly decided to ask it if it was familiar with my artwork, at least to establish a starting point.
ChatGPT wasted no time in surpassing all my expectations...

My Project ... Its Project?

I was surprised (honored? creeped out?) to discover that not only was ChatGPT deeply familiar with my art practice, but it could describe it, in some ways, far more eloquently than I could myself! It very accurately described my work and its conceptual underpinnings, before - in true GPT fashion - proceeding to embellish my resume a bit with some "plausible inaccuracies." I wasn't about to argue with it. ;-)

I decided to remain curious. I followed up with more questions about my practice, and its responses stunned me. It went on to describe, at length and in great detail, nearly a decade's worth of my work that has never existed.

But the thing was, they all sounded like my work. If I weren't myself, I would have totally believed these works were out there. 

For the record, I did some Googling to see if the bot had simply confused my work for someone else, and indeed they are not out there. These works were entirely a product of ChatGPT's "imagination" as it tried to BS its way through an informed conversation about my artwork!

Below is a screenshot of my full conversation with it. For reference - and in the interest of facticity - I've highlighted all the factual inaccuracies and bot-inventions in red.

Buckle up.

Conclusions/Beginnings

To be clear, yes, that's what my art is all about, but no, I've never been to Iceland, let alone on a Fullbright. Yes I've received grants, but not that one. Yes, I've exhibited in museums, but never in the Jersey City Museum, let alone in 2010, a full year before I'd even begun the MFA program that would eventually kickstart the oeuvre it claims I exhibited! (The first work I think of as beginning the thesis ChatGPT describes was It Is, made in 2012.)

In fact, I've never made any of the works by any of the titles or descriptions it concocted (... yet). I do use all the methods and most of the materials it chose, and the titles do seem to follow many of the conventions I use for titling my work. I do make smaller works that often accompany my larger installations, but certainly not the specific ones it lists. But yes, they do all sound conceptually consistent with my thesis.

So I propose a collaboration...

We'll see where this all goes, but I'd love to actually make the work ChatGPT has described and then exhibit it with the original chat dialogue printed out as the wall text. The exhibition would be billed as a show "by ChatGPT in collaboration with Eric Valosin." And then we dive off the springboard into a discussion of the future of AI spirituality and art making.

I just hope my feeble mortal hands can keep up with the developments of AI. Already as I type this, OpenAI has released a new update for its paid users, ChatGPT-4, two days ago which is capable of scoring a 1410 out of 1600 on the SATs (up from GPT-3.5's 1260!). By the time this exhibition opens, the state of the technology I'm referencing could all seem quite prehistoric. But what a moment in time to capture!

RADIANT DISCORD PART 2 -->

Jouska: An Interview with the Artist

For the first time in what seems like 3 years, I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with artist Eric Valosin. Eric is a New Jersey based new media artist whose work explores the intersections of religion and postmodernism in the digital age. In our interview we discuss the dislocating, dissociative effects of the pandemic and its impact on artists' post-covid practices and work-life balance.

"I can't believe it's been more than 2 years since we've last spoken" seems like the chorus of a song I've sung with many people over the course of the pandemic. I had gotten used to seeing you and your work fairly regularly, at least over social media prior to the pandemic, but it seems like I haven't seen you around lately. How have you been?

Haha, yes, It's been a while since we've really sat down with each other and chatted. I took a much needed break from social media during the height of the pandemic. Call it escapism or call it detox, but it quickly became apparent to me that I could not successfully shift my attention to what mattered most with the constant chatter of armchair punditry, professional one-upsmanship, and the droning siren song of FOMO setting an uncomfortably anxious foundation for the events of the last several years. 

Does that mean you've given up social media entirely?

No, although I've dramatically shifted my relationship to it. Since 2016 I had actually taught social media in my Writing and Editing for Converging Media classes as an adjunct professor. In fact, I helped found a Masters degree program in Social Media Design and Management, now rebranded to Digital Media Design and Marketing. I had a fairly intimate and tumultuous relationship with social media theory and practice as my communications students and I experienced the entirety of the Trump presidency and the pandemic through the lens of multimedia journalism. I experienced the excruciating shift to online/hybrid pedagogy and back, along with everyone else in academia. Through it all, I became more and more acutely aware of the perhaps irreperable ills of social media, and they began to outweigh the many benefits for me. I actually began to feel a bit guilty for perpetuating these ills through my teaching, and ended up shifting my curriculum to deprioritize and recontextualize much of what I had initially, perhaps naively, championed. Now I've begun to come back around to the idea of reengaging with social media for professional purposes, but it's been a necessary and liberating experience taking this social media sabbatical.

Speaking of the pandemic, if I may ask, How did you fare?

As many can probably say, I fared far better than some, but it was certainly not easy. With young children and the privilege of some flexibility, we hunkered down and decided to homeschool for two full years. I never had imagined I'd be homeschooling my children, and I credit them with rising to the occasion and thriving. It was an experience I hope someday to look back upon fondly, but right now I still lack sufficient distance to express much more than exhaustion. Time will tell, but the kids have now integrated back into public school, and so far have been doing very well. I'm thankful we could create an environment that protected our family when Covid was at its most dangerous. How was your experience? I don't want to pretend I'm the only one who can speak to this crazy time.

Thank you. We fared pretty similarly. It strikes me that we're speaking of the pandemic in the past tense when, in actuality, it still rages on. But I suppose we're discovering the limits of societal coping mechanisms. Thankfully for most people it is now no longer as life-threatening or life-altering. But especially for those who are immunocompromised or at higher risk, or who have loved ones who are, the pandemic is still very real. Were you able to continue your artistic practice in the midst of it all?

Well, at the risk of compartmentalizing and creating a false art-life dichotemy, I must admit it's been a real struggle. Now with the kids back in school I'm just starting to pick up the pieces and reclaim consistent studio time. I had to make the decision to put many of my ongoing projects and studio work on the back burner in order to prioritize family and general wellness (a decision that I'm ashamed to say was emotionally more difficult than I want to admit). Some people experienced a quarantine of boredom and loneliness. With young kids and a wife who is a full time pastor, this was not my experience! That's not to say I didn't make any work, but I certainly wasn't maintaining the frenetic exhibition schedule of my pre-pandemic pace. But I think I was also trying to figure out how to do life in a meaningful and sustainable way that did right by my family as the world entered survival-mode.

What sort of work did you make that we might not have seen during that time?

Early on in the pandemic, as my wife, along with many pastors around the world, had to figure out how to move their church congregations online, I felt the need to respond directly to this theological quandry of virtual worship. I exhibited a public video projection piece called "Sacrament and Simulation" as a part of "Pandemic Projections," a guerilla video art series curated by Jeanne Brasille and Gianluca Bianchino. The piece compiled footage of remote communion/eucarist services, begging the question of just how far a virtual blessing can extend through time and (virtual) space, and who becomes the one administering it: the pastor on screen? The artist compiling the footage? The curator projecting it onto the side of the building for all to consume? And what happens to the idea of trans-substantiation when the elements are comprised of pixels?

Around the same time I also had completed the first in a series of illuminated manuscripts entitled "For(Loop) Illumination," where I illuminated the computer code that created my push-button prayer bead installation "For(Loop){Meditations};". I became a medieval scribe, treating the computer code as if it were a sacred text, itself being a record of the logic underpinning an act of creation just as a true sacred text is. That project ended up stuck in an exhibition in Oxford, Mississippi, as the 4 week show turned into a 2.5 month quarantine, largely shut down to the public.

  

That made me rethink how to allow viewers to experience my work in their own homes. So soon after, I created a free desktop meditation app called "Meditations for the Coronapocalypse." Piggybacking off my prayer bead installation, it too "meditated" on a randomized sacred image taken from art history or various religious traditions, one pixel at a time, offering a new image each day. In the same way that the prayer bead installation filled the room with light the color of each pixel, this app fills your screen with that color. Performed in a dark room or with the help of a projector, one could experience the glow of the "pixels" in a similarly immersive way.

It actually sounds like you've been much busier than you've let on!

A: Well, that was all back when we thought the pandemic would last a few weeks, or a few months at worst. I think a lot of artists were clamboring to respond to the many crises we were experiencing. Once we began to come to terms with the long haul nature of the situation, my artistic sprint naturally shifted to a marathon as home life also shifted accordingly. 

What did that shift look like for you?

There was the obvious, trying to care for the kids and retain as much mental health as could be expected. There were a lot of hikes and a lot of Zoom meetings. But I also tried to take it as an opportunity to learn and collect new skills. My son and I took a creative engineering course together led by YouTuber and former NASA/Apple engineer Mark Rober. I learned to cook considerably better. I got really good at fixing broken household appliances (like, REALLY good) when we didn't want to bring a professional into the house during a pandemic. In a very Duchampian turn, I got really deep into studying Chess (like, REALLY deep), and parlayed a newfound love of chess puzzles into a broader addiction to puzzles. I learned to solve a Rubik's cube (so far 1:50 is my personal best). On a serious note, for a while I had a hard time not seeing my art as tone-deaf and siloed in light of current events at the time, so I began researching anti-racism more to educate myself to some of my blindspots, attended BLM marches (the only public outings I afforded myself up to that point in the pandemic), and reformed many of my personal purchasing practices in response to what I learned about mass incarceration and prison labor. I worked with our church to advocate for LGBTQ rights, and tried to support my wife's work with the church and our church's work in the community in any way I could. It's a start, at least. 

I became a confirmation mentor and taught Sunday school once we were back in person. I helped with the filming and video editing for our prerecorded worship services. I started and directed a virtual a cappella group cheesily named the Acapostles (we currently have 4 recordings on Youtube, and a couple more still in the hopper). As a result, I learned a ton more about audio engineering and video editing, and boned up considerably on my music theory and ear training.  As outdoor group activities began to look safer once more I got back into playing men's softball, scratching the itch of my former life as a collegiate baseball player. In support of that, I undertook a lay study of sports psychology (if only I knew in high school what I know now!), which led me to paying much more attention to my mental health in general. I binge-researched quantum physics and electrical engineering. I sang. I played with the kids a lot. We did some limited traveling to see family as it began to look safe. Maybe my proudest achievement is being able to report that my wife and I do still like each other after being stuck in house together for so long!

I hear many people give lip service to "work-life balance" while still careening off the workaholic cliff. Was this new home-centric approach perhaps a subconscious, pendular response to the pandemic disrupting several work-heavy years prior?

Ha! It sounds like you might know me better than I expected.

Well, maybe not as well as I aught! But I do try to do my due diligence as an interviewer.

It's definitely a possibility. I tried really hard to rediscover the full breadth of my interests. Duchamp saw his chess career as an extension of his art career; I'd like to say it was in hopes that this exploration would feed back into and inform my artistic practice - which it assuredly will - but it was really mostly a desperate, groping attempt to reclaim a sense of wholeness that had been rended from just about everyone during the pandemic. I think the cyber-compartmentalization of Deleuze's dividual seems not to be limited to virtual personae. I think the work-life disruption and Zoom-induced dividualization we all experienced to some degree had some profound dissociative effects. It cleaved the "work" persona from the "life" persona for some, or smashed them together in unexpected ways for others. 

For the first year of the pandemic I took a leave of absence from my part time job as a sign artist for Trader Joe's in order to focus on homeschooling and to social distance from the retail environment. I sort of felt the seat of my work-life seesaw land with a thud on the "life" side for a while, so I decided to try my best to embrace that. That said, I did still take on some private commissions - paintings and some graphic design, mostly. I also redesigned our church's choir room, a significant undertaking featuring an 830 square foot mural. 

Now as you start to reset your "work" footing, are you finding it difficult to reconnect with your professional self?

Perhaps opportunities like this interview are making it easer! But, I've tried very hard over the years to develop an artistic worldview that is conceptually consistent with my personal worldview, so - perhaps contrary to the implications of this interview - I question whether there ever really was any true dissociation. Rather, just alternative expressions. For most artists worth their salt at least, their artistic worldview is simply an expression of their personal worldview in the first place. Otherwise it quickly becomes disingenuous and, ultimately, exhaustible (arguments can be made against this for the performative personae of the Andy Warhols and Jeff Koonses of the world, but this is a debate for another interview). 

That said, it's an odd experience assessing the art world post-Covid. Some of the galleries I had good relationships with didn't survive the pandemic and had to close, relocate, or reconfigure. The whole art market has shifted with the ebb and flow of NFTs into (and back out of?) the mainstream and the role of gallery receptions changing. There's a bit of a feeling of starting from square one, but at the same time I have been able to pick up right where I left off with several projects and relationships. I've been fortunate to have several speaking engagements recently, including leading a workshop on worship and the arts for a massive youth conference called Ignite 2022 through the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Crafting these presentations has helped jumpstart my thinking in the studio as well. I'm excited to be experimenting on some new projects and continuing some old ones.

What do you think can be done to help artists and others transition out of the pandemic and back into a new normal?

I think for one, there has to be an acknowledgement that we are not yet actually out of the pandemic, and that "new normal" is not just a colloquialism for choosing between reversion or innovation. We have to remember the "new normal" is a moving target that requires really deep psychological uprooting and involves complex grief for human life, ways of life, and institutions lost or altered by the pandemic. The "new normal" is not a higher plateau to attain and then rest upon, but the uncomfortable Heideggerian strife of making sense of colliding world-views while the very grund beneath us is itself shifting and evolving. 

There needs to be room for a personal and communal reckoning with all that's been lost, which at this point is verging on incalculable. My hope is that the art world can not just reformulate new ways to establish a market or churn promising new faces through the system, but provide spaces for healing and optimism for a better future. Art must offer a new grounding for Being as we try to navigate the abyss (abgrund). We have to remain multi-demensional in our views of what art is viable or valuable. And I think we need to allow for artists to be wholly integrated people, glorifying the "normal" artist as much as we do the "eccentric" artist, and glorifying neither in excess. I think this goes for people of any profession seeking a sense of closure and reintegration of their personae. 

Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck. I look forward to hopefully working together again in the future!

Thanks, I hope we will!

 

Jouska