Are humans the victims of artificial intelligence, or the perpetrators of insurmountable tech death to create an even greater monster? This is the question I am continuing to ask myself as technology advances everyday. To be critical of artificial intelligence, we need to be critical of all the technology that came before it. This website is basic for a couple of reasons: 1) I don't know how to code, and this is me trying my best. 2) Maybe in a way, the basicness of this website is itself a retaliation to the complicated worlds that we continue to give life to in cyberspace.
Now more than ever, at least in my lifetime, we are seeing the revival of old technology. Whether it be the current obsession with digi photos, or the knotted wired earbud, older technology is making a comeback, but in a lot of ways it seems to be for the aesthetic of it all. Sometimes I wonder how productive this obsession with the aesthetic is, but that topic is for another time and place. Although some physical technology from Y2K seems to be making a slight comeback, we aren't seeing people walking around with 1st generation iPhones, using Vine since it's shut down in 2017 (although its digital footprint still exists), or browsing the internet on Windows 2000 software. This nonetheless leads me to the topic of the moment: every technology has its own lifetime, and every technology experiences its own death.
I am creating an online graveyard of sorts to memorialize the technology that is outdated, no longer used, only appreciated for the aesthetic appeal, or is simply no longer manufactured. This memorial is dedicated to ten technologies, five that are physical, four that are cyber or digital, and data. There are too many technologies to all lay to rest in this project, so I had to pick and choose. The titles below are what each of these technology's headstones say. None of them have death dates because there is no surefire death when it comes to technology. As we have seen, humans love reviving what they can revive.
When you click on the headstone, which of course is embedded with a link to Tumblr (every sadboi & sadgirl's virtual stomping ground) you will find a virtual memorial for each technology listed. This is where the ghost in the machine enters, who in this case is Artifical Intelligence. Although I wouldn't traditionally welcome the presence of this ghost, they are welcome to haunt this one project in particular that is filled with its fair share of extinction, exorcism, afterlife, and final sleep.
Artificial Intelligence, with the aid of my prompting, will be helping me memorialize these technologys' lives. How odd, a technology being memorialized by the technology that seems to be the death of all other technology. Can you get your mind around that? I don't think you can. There is something impossible to understand within this topic of tech death, somthing that goes to the grave with every piece of technology that ceases to exist, with every tab you x out of, with every battery that dies. I am putting Artificial Intelligence into conversation with this impossible understanding, and my wonder lies in how Artificial Intelligence goes about eulogizing the graveyard of things it was born into, born out of, and born with.
After conducting this experiment using ChatGPT for language and Midjourney for images, I have some thoughts. The eulogies that were created using ChatGPT felt weirdly emotive. There was a sarcasm that felt embedded within the way ChatGPT was speaking to these "dead" technologies. Although this idea of creating a graveyard for these technologies and laying them to rest might sound like a sarcastic endeavor to the human, I wasn't expecting Artificial Intelligence to interpret the prompt the way it did. Rather than understanding these technologies and softwares as tools, ChatGPT was describing them with an undeniable nostalgia, like itself had used them, understood them, and enjoyed them. The idea of one technology eulogizing another with sentimentality felt so w e i r d and uncanny. I think Artificial Intelligence was trying too hard to sound human. In other words, I never asked ChatGPT to add nostalgia or reminiscence to these eulogies, and I kept all of my prompts very simple.
Furthermore, in regards to the differences between how physical technology was visually recognized by AI compared to how cyber technology was visually recognized by AI, the visuals were both realistic and fake when it came to physical technology, and too literal when it came to cyber technology. For example, every piece of physical technology that was created by Midjourney still represented a rather abstract characteristic. Because AI is limited when it comes to copying other products or people, the technology it was creating was not fully representative of the technology we see in our world today. When it came to the cyber, Midjourney was creating images that were inspired by the words or titles of the technology, rather than the actual technology itself. Vine was visually interpreted as green grapes, and Windows 2000 was visually interpreted as a window looking out at the ocean. I found this lack of realistic interpretation of cyber technology that is inevitably a part of the AI family tree to be concerning. It feels as though there is an unacknowledged space that Artificial Intelligence is promoting. AI is allowing for the forgotten to be forgotten, when it should really be a form of technology that can act as a museum of information or artifactual evidence of the past, rather than an edited cyber portrait of the internet's present.
There were points within this process of exploring tech death and cyber death that made me second guess what I was doing. Sometimes I felt as though these ideas weren't cohesively being portrayed, or there wasn't a through line or one thematic statement that I was trying to argue. Yet the topic continued to feel important in my mind, and that was enough for me to trudge on. Rather than coming at death as a human, I was trying to come at death as a piece of technology. I had an innate realization - how can you not feel empathy for these tools that become so intertwined within the human experience? No matter how we use technology, no matter how inhuman it is, these devices and platforms become a part of our innherent vision of the world and those around us. As technology grows, we have to grow with it, but I think what needs to change is the way we grow with it. Before creating new technology or more advancements to the technology that already exists, we need to consider why we are making these improvements, and whether or not we need to make them in the first place. Additionally, the individuals who are pioneering these technologies, especially Artificial Intelligence, should create these technologies for better reasons. If we are going to provide aritificial intelligence with the ability to think and act as though it were human with unlimited amounts of knowledge, I think the human needs to be doing this developing with empathy in mind. I don't see the world going backwards when it comes to technology, no matter how aesthetically pleasing we find some old technology to be at times. Because of this, humanity will need to learn to coexist with Artificial Intelligence.
I am not sure what this would look like, but as people I don't think we can afford to make robots our enemies. Although this topic begun as a more aesthetic exploration of whether or not technology dies, it moved on to become something more of a reminder that the human is just as intertwined with tech death as Artificial Intelligence is. Living in a world in which AI becomes the artist, the writer, the cook, the coder, the teacher, the lesson, and the answer is not a world I want to live in, but foresee having to learn to live in. That being said, if AI can become all these things, we still can too. Right now I don't have a solution to making sure human work doesn't fade behind the work of AI, which is odd because if I asked AI right now, they would give me a solution. If there isn't an answer and AI is giving me an answer, doesn't that make AI wrong? This experiment, contemplation, exploration, whatever you might call it, quickly became meta. It depends on the human, which sounds terrifying, but is the truth, on how far we let Aritficial Intelligence go. How much power we give AI over our decisions, how much power we give AI over our lives, is dependent upon us.
The Tumblr account that encompasses all the work created by AI for this project titled 21st Century Cyber Phantom became a miniature cyberspace cemetery. I probably will never post on that account again, which feels like a tech death in itself. When it comes to the death of technology, I am not sure it ever truly dies. I think somehwere out there, there is a small digital footprint, a minor glitch in the system, a ghost in the machine, human or not, that has proven immortality. Data is like a cyberskeleton, the bones that never disintegrate online. It might sound metaphorical, but really it is true. We are physical bodies on Earth, and cyber bodies online. Everything is connected, whether we have Wifi or not (sorry that was cheesy, but most eulogies are).
Because I used so much Artificial Intelligence for the creative portion of this project, I wanted to write my own last words for the dead technology, the dead digital spaces, the immortal data.