September 12, 2024

On truth and bullshit in images, part 1

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.

Harry G. Frankfurt: On Bullshit

I've been thinking about how large generative models have no concept of truth to reference during their process, so they can't produce ‘the truth’ or a lie. Only bullshit, right? Models can produce photorealistic images, but can’t tell if even a photo (or a sentence) is meant to record or alter reality. It rests on the person who puts this image in context whether it's used to represent something true, vague nonsense, or deliberate misinformation. The "essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony[...] What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. [...] What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made."

Contrast that with a person creating an image that already has some relationship to truth by the time it's ready, because an artist makes all the decisions with their truth in mind.

I’m currently reading different essays to understand what’s true in an image beyond representing facts. In the meantime, I did notice something interesting. Even people who don’t create or value art much can signal this truth, since they are moved more by certain images that reference it.¹

They get emotional.
Angry.

Yes, we are talking about some of the images in the US elections. (Sorry.)

1. There was the incident of calling a real photo of an event an AI-generated crowd: a lie that died quickly. However, using this attack erodes the trust in all political images by questioning if there is a shared truth ( in this case, facts) to reference.
2. There are the AI propaganda images, like Taylor Swift in an Uncle Sam costume used by the Republican campaign (no, I will not link to it). It's obviously model-generated, so it does not seem consequential, just nonsense bullshit as usual. Also died quickly. It’s more like throwing spaghetti at the wall, most of these images don’t stick.²
3. And then there’s the TIME magazine cover featuring Kamala Harris, a predictable portrait of this political moment. However, the fact that an artist chose to represent this truth got under the skin of the other candidate. While other factors also accounted for his reaction, he referenced the artist several times during his public meltdowns. It seems a lot harder to discredit or forget this representation. It stayed alive.

So far, my favourite definition on what’s truth in art is called something else. It’s Lynda Barry’s definition of an image as ‘something which seems somehow alive … in the way thinking is not, but experiencing is, made of both memory and imagination.’ Poetic, but not vague.

Lynda Barry shared in an interview that she can't and won’t convince anyone about the aliveness of the image or the process. However, even the people we least expect to understand it will show us they feel the difference.

Bis bald!