Ungoliant's AI

But she had disowned her Master, desiring to be mistress of her own lust, taking all things to herself to feed her emptiness; and she fled to the south…Thence she had crept towards the light of the Blessed Realm; for she hungered for light and hated it. In a ravine she lived, and took shape as a spider of monstrous form, weaving her black webs in a cleft of the mountains. There she sucked up all light that she could find, and spun it forth again in dark nets of strangling gloom, until no light more could come to her abode; and she was famished. - JRR Tolkien, from The Silmarillion

We return, my friends, to a familiar theme: the Satanic nature of AI art (see also, for example, here).

Notice how Ungoliant is described by Tolkien: evil is only, and can ever only be, parasitic. It draws in and 'sucks up', and then 'spins' the results forth again 'in dark nets of strangling gloom' - it does not create. And in the end it becomes famished, precisely because nothing about it is nourishing (one can think of it, in fact, as the absence of nourishment). 

Hence, of course, Morgoth and Sauron (and Saruman, their pale imitator) cannot create either - they can repurpose and redesign and corrupt what already exists, but they cannot make afresh. They can at best deploy machines to extract what they can from the earth and forge it into materials they can use, but they add nothing to creation itself.

This is fundamentally what AI does - and, for the avoidance of doubt in case there are any literalists out there, I do not mean to suggest that AI is actually Satanic in the sense that the devil is behind it - in that it simply trawls through, and 'sucks up' what already exists, in order to spit it out into repurposed, repackaged chunks. The results are thin, vapid pastiche, interesting only inasmuch as it can fool the human eye into thinking it was produced by a real person, or insofar as it is fascinating trying to figure out what it will do next. It is not substantively art in the sense that it can move, or transcend, or communicate the sublime.

What it can also do is creep us out. In my previous writings on the subject, I have noted that there is something ineffably eerie about AI-produced images - there is a kind of deadness to them. Yet at the same time they also manage to communicate a sense of flat affect, particularly in the human visage - as though the people it depicts have seen great sadness, and horror, and that they have come to the conclusion that the only appropriate means of interacting with the world is to disengage from its pain and sorrow:

It struck me as almost too 'on the nose', then, when I came across this highly thought-provoking piece on the subject of how AI training sets are put together and curated. It begins with the findings that LAION-5B, one of the biggest and most important AI training sets, contains thousands of images of the sexual abuse of children (which in itself I think should probably give you pause if you are in the habit of using this new toy). But it goes from there in an interesting direction, showing to us that what we think of as 'AI' is very much human-directed, and reliant of human input, in this case assessments made by actual human beings to vet the quality of images. As the authors of the piece make clear, this means that while we might think of AI as applying a kind of neutral 'brute force' method of generating images, it is actually doing it on the basis of a set of preferences of real-world human beings, and these are human beings of a very particular kind:

The creators of SAC are transparent about the shortcomings of the set, specifically the fact that the scores were submitted by users who were both WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and developers of AI art, a demographic they describe as leaning toward "nerdy" and "esoteric." Furthermore, they admit that most of the ratings in the dataset were submitted by a "handful of users," whose "aesthetic preferences dominate the dataset."...The concepts of what is and isn't visually appealing can [therefore] be influenced in outsized ways by the tastes of a very small group of individuals, and the processes that are chosen by dataset creators to curate the datasets.

The point here of course is that the type of person who develops AI art and is therefore 'nerdy' and 'esoteric' is likely to be the kind of person who has been hardened by many years of prolonged internet usage against any sort of geniune feeling, and has come to adopt the highly-arch, sardonic, sarcastic and cynical perspective within which any long-term internet user invariably comes to marianade. It is the tastes and preferences of this kind of person - we all know this kind of person - which influence the composition of the datasets on which AI art is generated, and it is their emotional tone which therefore bleeds through most strongly in the AI art which we end up seeing. We don't really see this explicitly, but I think we (those of us who feel as I do, anyway) intuit something of it in the pervasive sense of unease and inchoate nastiness which pervades this stuff wherever it is encountered. It is I think the type of art that would be prized by Melniboneans, or Melkor - and there is actually a reason why it feels that way.