Style transfer
In a recent piece responding to the controversy of OpenAI appropriating Scarlett Johansson’s voice, art critic Ben Davis makes a point about the reification of style:
This seems like the reality that these A.I. tools will force us to reckon with: They promise to do for style what the internet did for content, dramatically eroding its value by making it easily portable. It’s going to be very difficult to develop any artistic personality with durable value when you can just click on anything and type, “give me my version of this.”
The emphasis here, in keeping with the assumption that what gives content its value is inaccessibility, is on the devaluation of artistic style as an economic asset that belongs to someone by making it immediately accessible to others. But isn’t style spoiled at the point of its becoming property, the moment of its monetization and commodification rather than that of its accessibility? Generative models just promise to automate that process of turning a fleeting style into a recognizable brand.
Generative tools purport to demystify the idea that anything connects a specific individual with a specific style — i.e. style is fully alienable (and can be bought and exploited like alienated labor). Thus anyone can appropriate a style once models isolate and extract its essence; a style has no essential lived-in quality. It can be abstracted away from the bodies or objects that instantiate it.
Moreover, in the process of extracting an exportable style from a certain body of data, the models impose a definite style on artists, reducing any complexity, contradiction, or dynamism (not to mention future evolution) to a set of static tropes that can be applied to anything else.
The common understanding of how to define style may change to accommodate the idea of mechanistic “style transfer.” Where once style was something ineffable and subjective exuded by the living practice of artists, it may become the concretized quasi-objective output of a statistical analysis. Rather than “AI” simulating an existing style, the style will itself first emerge from data processing. (I’ve probably written about this enough times by now that a generative model could say it for me, a joke I have certainly made before.)
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Internal exile to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.