Tactical Entanglements ENTANGLEMENTS
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MartinZeilinger TACTICAL Tactical EntanglementsTactical ENTANGLEMENTS AI ART AGENCY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ZEILINGER Tactical Entanglements Martin Zeilinger (Senior Lecturer in Computational Art and Technology, Abertay University) is an Austrian researcher and curator currently based in Dundee, Scotland. His work focuses on critical artistic approaches to emerging blockchain and AI technologies, intellectual property issues in contemporary art, and aspects of experimental videogame culture. He has co-curated Vector Festival (Toronto) since 2014, and organized the 2019 MoneyLab symposium (London). His research is available in books such as Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain and the MoneyLab Reader 2, and journals including Philosophy & Technology, Culture Machine, and Media Theory. // marjz.net / @mrtnzlngr Tactical Entanglements: AI Art, Creative Agency, and the Limits of Intellectual Property Martin Zeilinger Financial support for this publication was provided through the Abertay University Open Access Publication Fund. The cover shows an AI-generated image output created by the AI artist and researcher Tom White (https://drib.net/). Reminiscent of the now-famous AI artwork Portrait of Edmond Belamy and the authorship dispute it sparked (discussed in chapter 4), the images “were made by [White] using [Robbie Barrat's] code to show that [Obvious Collective] could have done the same” (Artnome 2018). Bibliographical Information of the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie (German National Bib- liography); detailed bibliographic information is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de. Published in 2021 by meson press, Lüneburg, Germany www.meson.press Design concept: Torsten Köchlin, Silke Krieg Copy editing: Isobel Campbell The print edition of this book is printed by Lightning Source, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom. ISBN (Print): 978-3-95796-183-9 ISBN (PDF): 978-3-95796-184-6 ISBN (EPUB): 978-3-95796-185-3 DOI: 10.14619/1839 The digital edition of this publication can be downloaded freely at: www.meson.press. This publication is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 Inter- national license. To view a copy of this license, visit: https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. Copyrights and permissions for images are noted in the image captions. Contents Acknowledgements 7 [ 1 ] Introduction: From Agency to Property, from AI to IP 9 Decentering Human Agency in AI Art 16 AI and Creativity in the Intellectual Property Milieu 21 Overview 26 [ 2 ] What Does AI Hack? Scaffolding for a Critical Art of AI 33 Redefining AI in and through Artistic Practice 36 Whence and Whither Agency? 42 Tactical AI 50 [ 3 ] (Dis)Locating Creativity, Agency, and Property in AI 57 AI Authorship According to Hegel 61 Can IP Law Accommodate Artistic AI? 66 [ 4 ] Copies Without Originals? AI-Generated Artworks and All-Too-Human Ownership Claims 77 GAN “Creativity” 82 “What matter who’s speaking” 87 [ 5 ] AI Art and the Deniability of Human Creative Agency 93 (In)validating Artfulness 94 Litigating AI Art 101 Copying and Human-Non-Readability 108 [ 6 ] From Non-Human Agency to Human Non-Agency: Creative Expression in the Age of Algorithmic Copyright Enforcement 115 Minimally Agential DRM and the Blackboxing of Copyright Adjudication 122 [ 7 ] Toward a Becoming-Tactical of AI Art 135 Queering AI 137 New Vectors of Non-Brute Force Computation 145 [ 8 ] AI Art for a Posthumanist Cultural Commons 155 GANs as “Generative Adversarial Copy Machines” 157 AI Beyond the Public Domain 162 Unownability in the Posthumanist Cultural Commons 166 References 175 Acknowledgements Book-writing is an amazingly collaborative effort, considering how alienating and lonely it can feel. In the pandemic-stricken year of social isolation during which I wrote most of this book, my work has occasioned very stimulating conversations and discussions with friends, colleagues, artists, and academic peers around the world, for which I’m immensely grateful. Thank you to friends and colleagues old and new, near and far, many of whom offered to look at and think about parts of the manuscript in its various iterations, and who provided feedback, encouragement, words of warning, questions, answers, or other kindnesses. They include Danilo Mandic, Tina Kendall, Ronald Ng, Andrew Bricker, Greg Smith, Bruce Lai and Katrina Lagacé, Jason Bailey at Artnome, Jeff Thompson, Nicky Hamlyn, Patricia de Vries, as well as Christos Michalakos, Hadi Mehrpouya, Joseph De Lappe, Darshana Jay- emanne, and Drew Hemment in and around Dundee. My critical perspective has been shaped in important ways by conversations with several of the artists whose work I discuss in the book—particularly Maja Smrekar, Adam Basanta, and Jake Elwes. Thank you for sharing your work and insights so generously. The book in its final form also gained tremendously from insightful commentary and critical remarks on a first draft, received from my excellent reviewers Carys Craig and Andreas Broeckmann. I am very grateful for the supportive welcome I received at Abertay University’s School of Design and Informatics, where I took up employment around the time I began working on the book. In particular, thank you to Dr. Dayna Galloway (Head of the Division of Games and Art), Professor Gregor White (Dean of School), and Professor Nia White (Dean of Graduate School) for supporting this publication through the university’s Open Access Fund. Thanks also to Andreas Kirchner and everyone at meson press, for taking on the project at a difficult time, and for seeing it through so efficiently. To many other friends, thanks for your patience in dealing with cancelled bike rides, skipped movie nights, postponed visits, unanswered phone calls, and much-delayed email replies—I have much yet to learn about book-life balance. Lastly, the biggest thanks goes to my family, for your enduring support, and to Deniz Johns, for all your love, encouragement, wisdom and understanding. [1] Introduction: From Agency to Property, from AI to IP This book explores digital artists’ experiments with emerging technologies of artificial intelligence (AI) in order to formulate a critique of how AI is impacting and reshaping the concepts of agency and ownership. The concerns underlying this focus can be roughly summarized as follows: on the one hand, AI appears to gesture toward new paradigms of thinking, acting and being that promise a push beyond ideological horizons centered on the human(ist) agent; but on the other hand, AI is deeply entangled with socio-economic and political regimes that rely on precisely this subject position, often in problematic alignments with the capitalist logic of contemporary ownership models. AI, in this sense, exists in a diffuse border region between the compelling idea of emerging non-human agency (embodied in the very notion of ‘artificial intelligence’ itself) and the all-too human con- texts in which contemporary AI tends to manifest (for example as algorithmic control mechanisms in the domains of work, govern- ance, law, finance, or entertainment). Using AI art as my core subject of analysis and discussion, I want to consider what inter- ventions can be staged in anthropocentric ownership models by 10 rethinking agency in and through AI. I will argue that critical uses of AI in digital art can be ideally suited for disturbing conventional notions of the singular, unified artist figure, of the unique art- work, and of anthropocentric perspectives on creativity as such. AI art can thus speculate on critical reconfigurations of creative agency—and therefore also on the potential destabilization of intellectual property (IP) models that continue to rely on the integrity the human(ist) agent as creator and owner. My discussion is not going to echo spectacularizing assertions that AI is “becoming creative” in the sense of fully autonomous computational entities capable of matching and exceeding the aesthetic, artistic, and artful expressions of humans. In my view, claims of emergent AI creativity tend to be marred by problematic anthropocentric biases, both regarding the concepts of creativity perpetuated in such claims, and regarding the humanistic own- ership models underpinned by these concepts of creativity. Rather than trying to imagine an AI art in which human artists are supplanted by human-like creative machines, I want to explore what collaborative entanglements exist between artists and AI, and consider the critical ends toward which such entanglements can be oriented. What new types of artistic practice, what recon- figurations of the author function, what new forms of creative and critical expression can be seen to manifest, in what I will call the works and workings of posthumanist agential assemblages? Given my focus on agency and ownership, two domains of critical thought are particularly important for this discussion. The first is law, and more specifically theories of intellectual property, which form a key critical interface between art, expressive agency, and the cultural and socio-economic environments within which they are embedded. The second is posthumanist thought, which I con- sider to be among the most useful frameworks for exploring the critical valences of AI in digital art. The conjunction of legal theory and posthumanism allows me to foreground discrepancies and productive contradictions between the two frameworks when it comes to issues of creative expression, agency, and ownership. Throughout, I draw on posthumanism in a sense similar to that 11 in which Gary Hall has described it, namely as a perspective that “is concerned with the displacement of the unified, self-reflexive, and rational humanist subject from its central place in the world as a result of the erosion of the human’s ‘natural’ boundaries with the animal, technology, and the environment” (Hall 2016, 93). In the context of AI art projects that recalibrate the shape and meaning of creative agency, such a perspective facilitates a departure from the “traditional liberal humanist model that comes replete with clichéd, ready-made . ideas of proprietorial authorship, . originality, fixity, and the finished object” (xiv).