Discussion About the 100% Inhuman Made Badges Project with Chris King

The following is an edited discussion between myself and Chris King concerning the 100% Inhuman Made badges project. The exchange was prompted by a post I shared on LinkedIn, the text of which is reproduced at the beginning.

What began as a response to the project's critique of human authorship and creativity developed into a wider conversation about AI, labour, capitalism, relationality, autonomy, distributed and collaborative authorship, and the nonhuman dimensions of cultural production. I've decided to publish the exchange here (with permission from Chris) because it raises a number of questions that seem increasingly important as debates around AI continue to unfold.

Chris King is a conservator of time-based media art at Tate.

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According to an editorial in The Observer this weekend (24 May), ‘Alongside excitement about the possibilities of AI, there needs to be much greater willingness to safeguard what it is to be human.’

But might there not be another possibility?

Might AI offer us an opportunity not simply to defend or preserve existing ideas of ‘the human’, but to radically reinvent what it means to be human in more generous and interdependent ways? Ways that might actually enable us to live more meaningfully in the crisis-ridden world of the early 21st century?

I’m thinking here not only of the planetary and environmental crisis, or the wider crisis of Western liberal democracy, but also of a deeper crisis of modernity itself: namely, a historically specific exploitative and extractive mode of being-in and being-with the world.

Take the climate crisis.

Our prevailing attitude toward the environment often positions nature either as passive background to be protected and managed, or as a freely available resource to be exploited for wealth and profit. In this respect, contemporary debates around AI sometimes reproduce a similar logic, framing artistic and intellectual labour as the property of a sovereign human subject whose originality must now be defended against machines.

Yet both positions depend upon a much older ontology of separation:

• human from nonhuman 
• culture from nature
• living from non-living
• mind from world

And perhaps it is precisely this ontology - together with the liberal humanist values associated with it - that AI might push us to question and eventually move beyond.

One of the latest projects my collaborators and I have been working on explores this possibility through a series of ‘100% Inhuman Made’ badges responding to the growing pro-human movement across the cultural industries, of which The Observer editorial in just one of many instances.

Rather than attempting to restore or defend the idea of the sovereign human author against AI, the project asks a different question:

Has any cultural work ever really been purely human-made?

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Chris King: Given that AI is predicated on this abstraction, how would you see it expanding or changing this view? Surely this would be in part it's own undoing?

Gary Hall: Yes. Although I think that depends on who or what we understand AI to be. Who or what is the ‘it’ that is doing the expanding or changing here?

Apologies if I’m misreading your point. But, to try to be clear, I’m not positing AI as something discrete and wholly distinct from the human; and yet also, in many ways, another version of the human, in that ‘it’ (what we’re calling AI) possesses a certain sovereignty and autonomy that would enable it to take a decision leading to ‘its own undoing’. Rather, I’m suggesting all this provides us with an opportunity to reconsider our understanding of the human, of AI and of their relation. On the 100% Inhuman project webpage – to show this is not merely some esoteric academic concern – I provide examples demonstrating how variations of this line of thought are already appearing across mainstream cultural and political thought. For example, in Doppelgänger, Naomi Klein argues that we need to reimagine our modes of relation, writing that ‘[t]here is an intimate relationship between our overinflated selves and under-cared-for planet.’

Similarly, as I discuss elsewhere, Olga Tokarczuk argues in ‘The Tender Narrator’, her 2018 Nobel lecture, for forms of literature that might enable us to move ‘beyond the limits of our ego.’ What we often regard as the most natural and authentically human mode of narration – the ‘individualized point of view, this voice from the self’ – also, she suggests, establishes an opposition between the self and the world. In contrast, she proposes ‘tenderness’ as a way of perceiving the world as ‘alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.’  It’s perhaps no surprise, then, to find that Tokarczuk has recently been criticised by sections of the pro-human establishment (as reported in the same issue of The Observer) for openly discussing her use of LLM AI to check facts and develop ideas.

Rebecca Solnit is another thinker who has recently emphasised the need to reimagine our modes of relation. In The Beginning Comes After the End, in order to talk about our ‘inseparability from nature’, she refers to how process biology:

looks at the world as made up of processes rather than objects, as phenomena forever flowing and changing and thereby exchanging with each other and changing into each other…. Life is a constant exchange, a nonstop process of incorporating and producing and excreting: what we call self is constantly taking in what is not itself, is constantly putting out things – from exhales to novels to infants – that are not itself… … definitions of each of us as individuals attempt to describe a discrete and autonomous being by denying the constant flow… [and bringing down] the imagined barriers that [separate] animals from humans, humans from nature…  

And humans from technology, we might add.

This, for me, is part of what makes AI so interesting: the way it has the potential to expose the limits of some of the older liberal-humanist assumptions many of us inherited and continue to work with and live by. Those centred on the idea of discrete autonomous beings, for example.

CK: I guess my thought is that it should be obvious that discreet objects are a second order phenomena of a matter whose fundamental basis is some kind of unit that comprises wholly of 'change' and as such everything is of course part of and in feedback with everything else. The cognitive or non-conscious (Hayles etc.) state of matter (computation) is also a second order property of this motion. However the very 'ontology of separation' that results in discreet 'objects' (like Humans) being given primacy is also the abstraction that makes the computation and the living processes work as these second order systems. An ontology without some capability of abstraction might also just be a completely dead one. If anything I think the semi-autonomous emergent cognition that is Capital already works to deconstruct the sovereign human author and abstract their work from them. We can only talk about AI as labour automation in this context. An AI or economic system without this theft of authorship (which is really a network property tied to labour value and the potential for a change in the rate of the increase in societies development) would no longer be labour automation and  fundamentally different relationship to computation, maybe?

GH: Thanks for this. It’s hard to discuss such things in this restricted format, but I think I agree with much of what you're saying.

Certainly, I wouldn't want to replace one simplistic ontology with another. The point is not to deny the existence or usefulness of abstractions, distinctions, boundaries, provisional separations or what Barad conceptualises as cuts. As you suggest, living systems, cognition and computation all seem to depend upon processes of differentiation. Without some capacity to abstract, identify patterns and produce relatively stable entities, there would be no organisms, no thought and no culture.

My concern is less with separation as such than with the tendency of certain modern liberal-humanist traditions to treat particular abstractions – the autonomous individual, the sovereign author, the self-contained human subject – as if they were primary, self-grounding and ontologically fundamental, rather than historically contingent and relational achievements.

That's one reason I've been interested in engaging with thinkers of relationality and processuality such as Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Rosi Braidotti, Anna Tsing, Bruno Latour - along with, more recently, figures such as the likes of Naomi Klein, Olga Tokarczuk and Rebecca Solnit - who seem to be taking many of their ideas, albeit indirectly, into the cultural mainstream. They don't abolish distinctions. Indeed, as you say, that would be impossible: we always have to make decisions, cuts. Rather, they ask what happens when we begin from relation, process and interdependence instead of treating them as secondary to already-formed objects and entities such as humans.

Can we cut differently?

I also think your point about capital is an important one. One could certainly argue that capital has long been deconstructing the figure of the sovereign human author, transforming creativity, knowledge and culture into distributed processes of exploitation, extraction and accumulation. In fact, one might say that capitalism has always known that authorship is collective and distributed. It has simply used liberalism, property and the law to organise and contain that collectivity in the interests of those already in possession of capital.

In this sense, AI may not represent a break so much as an intensification of dynamics already at work in capitalism.

If I read you right, where I would perhaps differ is that I don't think the critique of the sovereign human necessarily has to lead us either toward capital's abstractions or toward AI conceived primarily as labour automation. The challenge, for me, is whether there are ways of moving beyond possessive individualism and proprietary authorship that do not simply hand agency over to markets, platforms or machinic systems.

That's partly what the 100% Inhuman Made project is trying to probe.

If no work has ever been purely human-made, what kinds of responsibility, attribution, relation and collective life become possible once we acknowledge this fact? And how do we do so without simply allowing ‘the network’, ‘the market’ or ‘the machine’ to become the new sovereign subject in the human's place?

In that respect, I think your final question is exactly the interesting one: what would a fundamentally different relationship to computation actually look like? That seems to me to be one of the key political and philosophical questions opened up by AI.

CK: I think where we differ is that the emancipatory potential of any technology to create different ways of knowing is in medium critical agency (running own models/hardware/data sets etc) and that before we ask 'has any cultural work ever really been purely human-made', we need to ask has any profit been anything other than purely worker made? The sovereign capitalist subject needs to be dissolved first. Because for a lot of people the reality of enclosure and redundancy is very real, very scary, and we need to be clear where it is important to stand. (I am all for dissolving the role of artist/author produced under capital but first we must get somewhere to stand by dissolving the capitalist).

GH: Well, I wouldn't want the discussion of relationality, distributed and collaborative authorship, or the nonhuman dimensions of cultural production to become a way of obscuring questions of labour, ownership and exploitation. As you suggest, there’s a danger that critiques of the sovereign author can end up serving capital if they are mobilised to justify the unauthorised and unacknowledged appropriation of collective labour without compensation, accreditation or accountability.

You're right, too, that for many people the immediate reality is not a philosophical problem concerning the human but the very real – and often frightening – experience of redundancy, enclosure and economic precarity. Any discussion of AI that fails to acknowledge that risks appearing detached from the conditions under which people are living and working.

Where I would perhaps differ is on the question of sequence. I'm not sure we can dissolve the sovereign capitalist subject first and then turn to the sovereign human author or artist for at least three reasons:

First, the revolution may never happen, as it were. Yet – as I’m trying to show in much of my work – we can begin experimenting with different ways of being authors, artists and intellectuals right now.

Second, just as many would argue that we should not postpone addressing questions of race or gender until society has been transformed more broadly, neither should we necessarily wait in this case.

Third, historically the two seem deeply intertwined. Liberal notions of the autonomous individual, the property-owning subject and the proprietary author have often helped to legitimise particular forms of ownership and exploitation, accumulation and extraction. In that sense, questioning one may also be part of questioning the other.

At the same time, I completely agree that there’s a political question of where – and with whom and what – we stand. One reason I'm interested in projects around community-owned infrastructures, commons-oriented forms of knowledge production and alternative publishing economies is precisely because they open the possibility of thinking and working beyond both corporate AI and proprietary authorship.

The challenge, as I see it, is to avoid a situation in which critiques of human exceptionalism simply end up reinforcing the platform power of Big Tech.

Perhaps another way of putting it is that I'm less interested in dissolving the human than in dissolving a particular historically specific version of the human: the sovereign, possessive, self-owning individual that emerges alongside liberalism and capitalism. The question then becomes what kinds of collective, situated and radically relational forms of agency become possible afterwards.

In that respect, I suspect our positions may be closer than they first appear.

CK: I think we are fairly close, maybe as you say we differ on order of operations needed. I think symbolic exchange (capital) produces the role of artist/author in the sense we currently understand it and in order to produce new cultural forms we need to out compete the feedback system of capital with new economic forms which then downstream constitute new cultural formulations. But again this is largely detail because you are also thinking along these lines, too, and of course the mode of being of artists and authors right now can help build and participate in new economic systems and forms.