A few weeks back, some colleagues and I were invited to share some new thoughts and ideas on the theme of ‘ecomedia’, as a lovely and unconventional way to launch Simon R. Troon’s newest monograph, Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene. Here’s what I presented; a few scattered scribblings on environmental imaginaries as mediated through AI.
Grotesque Fascination:
Reflections from my weekender in the uncanny valley
In February 2024 OpenAI announced their video generation tool Sora. In the technical paper that accompanied this announcement, they referred to Sora as a ‘world simulator’. Not just Sora, but also DALL-E or Runway or Midjourney, all of these AI tools further blur and problematise the lines between the real and the virtual. Image and video generation tools re-purpose, re-contextualise, and re-gurgitate how humans perceive their environments and those around them. These tools offer a carnival mirror’s reflection on what we privilege, prioritise, and what we prejudice against in our collective imaginations. In particular today, I want to talk a little bit about how generative AI tools might offer up new ways to relate to nature, and how they might also call into question the ways that we’ve visualized our environment to date.
AI media generators work from datasets that comprise billions of images, as well as text captions, and sometimes video samples; the model maps all of this information using advanced mathematics in a hyper-dimensional space, sometimes called the latent space or a U-net. A random image of noise is then generated and fed through the model, along with a text prompt from the user. The model uses the text to gradually de-noise the image in a way that the model believes is appropriate to the given prompt.
In these datasets, there are images of people, of animals, of built and natural environments, of objects and everyday items. These models can generate scenes of the natural world very convincingly. These generations remind me of the open virtual worlds in video games like Skyrim or Horizon: Zero Dawn: there is a real, visceral sense of connection for these worlds as you move through them. In a similar way, when you’re playing with tools like Leonardo or MidJourney, there can often be visceral, embodied reactions to the images or media that they generate: Shane Denson has written about this in terms of “sublime awe” and “abject cringe”. Like video games, too, AI Media Generators allow us to observe worlds that we may never see in person. Indeed, some of the landscapes we generate may be completely alien or biologically impossible, at least on this planet, opening up our eyes to different ecological possibilities or environmental arrangements. Visualising or imagining how ecosystems might develop is one way of potentially increasing awareness of those that are remote, unexplored or endangered; we may also be able to imagine how the real natural world might be impacted by our actions in the distant future. These alien visions might also, I suppose, prepare us for encountering different ecosystems and modes of life and biology on other worlds.
But it’s worth considering, though, how this re-visualisation, virtualisation, re-constitution of environments, be they realistic or not, might change, evolve or hinder our collective mental image, or our capacity to imagine what constitutes ‘Nature’. This experience of generating ecosystems and environments may increase appreciation for our own very real, very tangible natural world and the impacts that we’re having on it, but like all imagined or technically-mediated processes there is always a risk of disconnecting people from that same very real, very tangible world around them. They may well prefer the illusion; they may prefer some kind of perfection, some kind of banal veneer that they can have no real engagement with or impact on. And it’s easy to ignore the staggering environmental impacts of the technology companies pushing these tools when you’re engrossed in an ecosystem of apps and not of animals.
In previous work, I proposed the concept of virtual environmental attunement, a kind of hyper-awareness of nature that might be enabled or accelerated by virtual worlds or digital experiences. I’m now tempted to revisit that theory in terms of asking how AI tools problematise that possibility. Can we use these tools to materialise or make perceptible something that is intangible, virtual, immaterial? What do we gain or lose when we conceive or imagine, rather than encounter and experience?
Machine vision puts into sharp relief the limitations of humanity’s perception of the world. But for me there remains a certain romance and beauty and intrigue — a grotesque fascination, if you like — to living in the uncanny valley at the moment, and it’s somewhere that I do want to stay a little bit longer. This is despite the omnipresent feeling of ickiness and uncertainty when playing with these tools, while the licensing of the datasets that they’re trained on remains unclear. For now, though, I’m trying to figure out how connecting with the machine-mind might give some shape or sensation to a broader feeling of dis-connection.
How my own ideas and my capacity to imagine might be extended or supplemented by these tools, changing the way I relate to myself and the world around me.
