Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This art-as-research autoethnography examines the disruptive influence of generative AI, positioning it at the nexus of augmented reflection and mediated normalization. It contrasts the stimulating role of creative stress, here posed as an essential resistance to complacency, with the destructive disinterest of Baudelaire’s ennui, a mediated depletion of resistance. AI emerges as a pharmakon, a dualistic tool that offers both a path to creative self-awareness and the risk of succumbing to systemic control. Adopting the perspective of neural phenomenology, affords an investigation of this ambiguity through generative text-to-image synthesis, asking how human poiesis – authentic creative emergence – can be maintained in socio-technical ecologies. The paper addresses the potential for cultural homogenization, proposing that the risk of AI model collapse might extend into culture, leading to a generic, sterilized ‘artificial creativity’. This research therefore advocates a balance that acknowledges and preserves an essential human uniqueness against the backdrop of algorithmic integration.

Keywords

computational poetics distributed subjectivity perspectival affordance stress affective aesthetics cognitive metaphor autoethnography AI pharmakon model collapse modal collapse neural phenomenology

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Ahmedien

DAM

(2024) A drop of light: an interactive new media art investigation of human-technology symbiosis. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11(1): 721. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03206-y

AUTOMATIC1111 (2022) Stable diffusion web UI. [Computer software]. https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui

Ballard

(2014) The Drowned World. Fourth Estate. (Original work published 1962).

Baudelaire

(1952) Poems of Baudelaire. Campbell R (trans). New York: Pantheon Books.

Baudelaire

(2015) The Flowers of Evil / Les Fleurs du Mal. Aggeler, W (trans). Digireads.com Publishing.

Bellemare-Pepin

Harel

O’Byrne

, et al. (2022) Processing visual ambiguity in fractal patterns: pareidolia as a sign of creativity. iScience 25(10): 105103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.105103

Berkovich-Ohana

Dor-Ziderman

Trautwein

F-M

, et al. (2020) The hitchhiker’s guide to neurophenomenology – the case of studying self boundaries with meditators. Frontiers in Psychology 11: 1680.

Blumenfeld-Jones

(2016) The artistic process and arts-based research: a phenomenological account of the practice. Qualitative Inquiry 22(5): 322–333. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800415620212

Bolter

(2023) AI generative art as algorithmic remediation. In: Wilde

LRA

Lemmes

Sachs-Hombach

(eds) Generative Imagery: Towards a ‘New Paradigm’ of Machine Learning-based Image Production. Herbert von Halem, pp. 195–207.

10.

Casey

(1976) Imagining: A Phenomenological Study. Indiana University Press.

11.

Casey

(1977) Imagination and phenomenological method. In: McCormick

Elliston

(eds) Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals. University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 70–82.

12.

cdteliot (nd) Latent space 101: what it is and why it matters. Perplexity AI. https://www.perplexity.ai/page/latent-space-101-what-it-is-an-mwXuxYfzS_.J4e_uFvOskg (accessed August 10, 2024).

13.

Chemero

(2009) Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. MIT Press.

14.

Choi

(2018) Guess, check and fix: a phenomenology of improvisation in ‘neural’ painting. Digital Creativity 29(1): 96–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2018.1423995

15.

Choi

(2022a) Losing Touch: A Comparative Phenomenology of Creative Process in Traditional and Neural Painting (Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence). PhD Thesis. Simon Fraser University. https://summit.sfu.ca/item/36505

16.

Choi

(2022b) The (de)situated subjective: a cognitive autoethnography of “the New York School”. Journal of Visual Art Practice 21(2): 97–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702029.2022.2069917

17.

Choi

DiPaola

Töyrylä

(2021) Artistic style meets artificial intelligence. Journal of Perceptual Imaging 4: 1–14. https://doi.org/10.2352/J.Percept.Imaging.2021.4.2.020501

18.

Clark

(1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again. MIT Press.

19.

Clark

(2013) Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36: 181–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X12000477

20.

Crawford

(2021) The Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.

21.

Crutzen

Stoermer

(2000) The anthropocene. The International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Newsletter 41: 17–18.

22.

Davidenko

Heller

Cheong

, et al. (2017) Persistent illusory apparent motion in sequences of uncorrelated random dots. Journal of Vision 17(3)19: 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1167/17.3.19

23.

Depraz

Varela

Vermersch

(2000) The gesture of awareness: an account of its structural dynamics. In: Velmans

(ed) Investigating Phenomenal Consciousness: New Methodologies and Maps. John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 121–136. https://doi.org/10.1075/aicr.13.10dep

24.

Depraz

Varela

Vermersch

(2003) On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing. John Benjamins Publishing.

25.

Derrida

(1981) Plato’s pharmacy. In: Johnson

(ed) Dissemination. University of Chicago Press, pp. 61–171.

26.

Dewey

(1934) Art as Experience. Minton, Balch & company.

27.

Dupré

(2022) AI loses its mind after being trained on AI-Generated data. Futurism. https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data

28.

Edwards

(2019) Creative insight method through arts-based research. In: Liamputtong

(ed) Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences. Springer, pp. 1131–1145. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5251-4_6

29.

Ellis

Bochner

(eds) (1996) Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing. AltaMira Press.

30.

Ellis

Bochner

(2000) Autoethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity. In: Denzin

Lincoln

(eds) Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2nd edition. Sage, pp. 733–768.

31.

Ellis

Adams

Bochner

(2011) Autoethnography: an overview. Forum for Qualitative Social Research 12(1). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-12.1.1589

32.

Eye on Tech (2023) What is AI model collapse? (in about a minute). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHdMMVaMBj0

33.

Flusser

(1984) Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books.

34.

Forceville

(2006) The source–path–goal schema in the autobiographical journey documentary. New Review of Film and Television Studies 4(3): 241–261. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400300600982023

35.

Ford

(2024) Adobe is Buying Videos for $3 per Minute to Build AI Model. Bloomberg.Com. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/adobe-is-buying-video-clips-for-3-per-minute-to-build-ai-model

36.

Fried

Rosenberg

(2023) AI could choke on its own exhaust as it fills the web. Axios. https://www.axios.com/2023/08/28/ai-content-flood-model-collapse

37.

Galison

(2002) Images scatter into data, data gather into images. In: Latour

Weibel

(eds) ICONOCLASH: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. ZKM Center for Art and Media. The MIT Press, pp. 300–323.

38.

Gallagher

(2009) Philosophical antecedents of situated cognition. In: Aydede

Robbins

(eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge University Press, pp. 35–53.

39.

Geertz

(1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb.01005

40.

Getzels

Csikszentmihalyi

(1976) The Creative Vision: A Longitudinal Study of Problem Finding in Art. John Wiley and Sons.

41.

Gregory

Heard

(1979) Border locking and the café wall illusion. Perception 8(4): 365–380. https://doi.org/10.1068/p080365

42.

Haraway

(2016) Tentacular thinking: Anthropocene, capitalocene, chthulucene. In: Haraway

(ed) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, pp. 30–57. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780-003

43.

Hardin

(1968) The tragedy of the commons. Science 162(3859): 1243–1248.

44.

Heidegger

(1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Garland Publishing Inc.

45.

HungryMinded (2022) Profession of the Future—Ai whisperer. The Medium. https://medium.com/seeds-for-the-future/profession-of-the-future-ai-whisperer-58c1b8a91059

46.

Husserl

(1982) Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Hackett Publishing.

47.

Husserl

(2001). In: Moran

Findlay

(eds) Logical Investigations. Routledge. (Original work published in German 1900/1901; first English publication 1970). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203879054

48.

Ihde

(1979) Technics and Praxis. D. Reidel Publishing Co.

49.

Ihde

(1990) Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Indiana University Press.

50.

Irwin

(2024) Adobe is buying videos for cheap to train its sora competitor. PC Magazine. https://www.pcmag.com/news/adobe-buying-videos-train-sora-competitor

51.

Janicka

(2024) Coarticulation: mutual transformation in human and nonhuman relations. SubStance 53(2): 38–58.

52.

Jenny

(2018) AI Weeds: What They are, How They could Choke off the Internet. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/ai-weeds-what-they-are-how-they-could-choke-the-web/

53.

Johnson

(1987) The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

54.

Kaplan

McCandlish

Henighan

, et al. (2020) Scaling laws for neural language models. arXiv:2001.08361. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2001.08361

55.

Karasu

(2023) On the face of it: pareidolia. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-gravity-of-weight/202306/on-the-face-of-it-pareidolia

56.

Klein

(2017) What is artistic research? Journal for Artistic Research. https://doi.org/10.22501/jarnet.0004

57.

Klein

(2023) AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/08/ai-machines-hallucinating-naomi-klein

58.

Koffka

(1935) Principles of Gestalt Psychology. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315009292

59.

Lakoff

(1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.

60.

Lakoff

Johnson

(1980) The metaphorical structure of the human conceptual system. Cognitive Science 4(2): 195–208. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0402_4

61.

Lakoff

Johnson

(1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books.

62.

Latour

Venn

(2002) Morality and technology. Theory, Culture & Society 19(5–6): 247–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327602761899246

63.

Leavy

(2009) Method Meets Art: Arts-Based Research Practice. Guilford Press.

64.

Lorde

(1984) The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. The Crossing Press, pp. 106–109.

65.

Lott

(2024) Massive breakthrough in AI intelligence: openai passes IQ 120. Maximum Truth [Substack]. https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/massive-breakthrough-in-ai-intelligence?utm_medium=email

66.

Lutkevich

(2023) Model collapse explained: how synthetic training data breaks AI. TechTarget. https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/Model-collapse-explained-How-synthetic-training-data-breaks-AI

67.

Mann

(2016) Interviews as reflective practice. In: Mann

(ed) The Research Interview: Reflective Practice and Reflexivity in Research Processes. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137353368_1

68.

Marche

(2023) Welcome to the big blur. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/03/gpt4-arrival-human-artificial-intelligence-blur/673399/

69.

McCormack

O’Neill

Ryan

, et al. (2020) Autoethnography in, and as, adult education: eavesdropping on a conversation. In: Grummell

Finnegan

(eds) Doing Critical and Creative Research in Adult Education. Brill Sense, pp. 73–85.

70.

McKie

(2024) Simply mind-boggling’: world record temperature jump in antarctic raises fears of catastrophe. The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/06/simply-mind-boggling-world-record-temperature-jump-in-antarctic-raises-fears-of-catastrophe

71.

McKinley

(2012) Painting Perspective: Quick Tips for Developing your Critical Eye. Artists Network. https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-mediums/pastel/take-a-step-back-tips-for-keeping-your-painting-in-perspective-part-1/

72.

McLuhan

(1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. University of Toronto Press.

73.

Meyrowitz

(2001) Morphing McLuhan: medium theory for a new millennium (Keynote address). In: Proceedings of the Second Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association, 2001, New York, NY, June 15–16, 2001, pp. 8–22.

74.

Morton

(2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press.

75.

Müller

(2025) Deep opacity in AI. In: A Companion to Applied Philosophy of AI. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., pp. 71–81.

76.

Muth

Carbon

C-C

(2013) The aesthetic aha: on the pleasure of having insights into gestalt. Acta Psychologica 144(1): 25–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2013.05.001.

77.

Naito

(2018) Stepping back from the canvas. The Medium. https://myranaito.medium.com/stepping-back-from-the-canvas-a0f2d91ed7d1

78.

Olivares

Vargas

Fuentes

, et al. (2015) Neurophenomenology revisited: second-Person methods for the study of human consciousness. Frontiers in Psychology 6(May): 673. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00673

79.

Pakes

(2019) Art as Action or Art as Object? the Embodiment of Knowledge in Practice as Research. ResearchGate (Accessed October 15, 2019).

80.

Pennington

(2022) You might actually find a muse in the machine (or midjourney). NAB Amplify. https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/ic-the-muse-in-the-machine/ (Accessed July 23, 2023).

81.

Pepperell

(2012) The perception of art and the science of perception. In: Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XVII (SPIE, 2012), pp. 330–341. SPIE Press.

82.

Pitard

(2019) Autoethnography as a phenomenological tool: connecting the personal to the cultural. In: Liamputtong

(ed) Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences. Springer, pp. 1829–1845. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5251-4_48

83.

Quilty-Harper

(2023) $335,000 Pay for ‘AI Whisperer’ Jobs Appears in Red-Hot Market. BNN Bloomberg. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/335-000-pay-for-ai-whisperer-jobs-appears-in-red-hot-market-1.1901850

84.

Redies

(2007) A universal model of esthetic perception based on the sensory coding of natural stimuli. Spatial Vision 21(1–2): 97–117. https://doi.org/10.1163/156856807782753886

85.

Redies

Brachmann

Hayn-Leichsenring

(2015) Changes of statistical properties during the creation of graphic artworks. Art & Perception 3(1): 93–116. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-00002017

86.

Robertson

(2022) Professional AI whisperers have launched a marketplace for DALL-E prompts. Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/2/23326868/dalle-midjourney-ai-promptbase-prompt-market-sales-artist-interview (Accessed May 18, 2023).

87.

Rosen

(2012) Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations. 2nd edition. Springer-Verlag.

88.

Runco

(2023) AI can only produce artificial creativity. Journal of Creativity 33(3): 100063. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yjoc.2023.100063

89.

Schofield

(2024) Camera phantasma: reframing virtual photographies in the age of AI. Convergence 30(2): 687–709. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231220314

90.

Schön

(2016) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Routledge. (Original work published 1983). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315237473

91.

Selye

(1956) The Stress of Life. McGraw-Hill.

92.

Shumailov

Shumaylov

Zhao

, et al. (2023) The curse of recursion: training on generated data makes models forget. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2305.17493

93.

Shumailov

Shumaylov

Zhao

, et al. (2024) AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature 631(8022): 755–759. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07566-y

94.

Stable Diffusion (nd). https://stability.ai/

95.

Stephensen

(2022) Artificial creativity: beyond the human, or beyond definition? Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture & Technology 36: 19–37. https://doi.org/10.33011/tf.v22i1.4679

96.

Stiegler

(1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press.

97.

Stiegler

(2012) Relational ecology and the digital pharmakon. Culture Machine 13. https://culturemachine.net/paying-attention/

98.

Strate

(2008) Studying media as media: Mcluhan and the media ecology approach. MediaTropes 1.

99.

Sullivan

(2010) Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts. Sage Publications.

100.

Thompson

Lutz

Cosmelli

(2005) Neurophenomenology: an introduction for neurophilosophers. In: Brook

Akins

(eds) Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement. Cambridge University Press, pp. 40–97. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610608.003

101.

Tversky

(2008) Spatial cognition: embodied and situated. In: Aydede

Robbins

(eds) The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge University Press.

102.

Van Beinum

(2024) Rethinking human–technology relations: exploring the sociopolitical dimensions of invasive brain stimulation. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11(1): 1710. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-04268-8

103.

Varela

(1996) Neurophenomenology: a methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4): 330–349.

104.

Varela

Thompson

Rosch

(1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.

105.

Varnedoe

(2006) Pictures of nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock. Princeton University Press.

106.

Vaswani

Shazeer

Parmar

, et al. (2023) Attention is all you need. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762

107.

Wilson

Golonka

(2013) Embodied cognition is not what you think it is. Frontiers in Psychology 4(February): 58. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00058

108.

Wittgenstein

(1958). In: Anscombe

GEM

(ed) Philosophical Investigations. 2d ed. Basil Blackwell. (Originally published 1953).

109.

Zahavi

(2017) Husserl’s Legacy. Oxford University Press.

110.

Zahavi

(2021) Applied phenomenology: why it is safe to ignore the epoché. Continental Philosophy Review 54(2): 259–273. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09463-y

111.

Zeilinger

(2021) Tactical Entanglements. Meson Press.

112.

Žižek

(2023) Artificial Idiocy. Project Syndicate. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ai-chatbots-naive-idiots-no-sense-of-irony-by-slavoj-zizek-2023-03

113.

Zylinska

(2020) AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams. Open Humanities Press.

Impact,art,and ennui: Toward a (neural)phenomenology of generative AI art

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References