immanence

The New York Times has published an article on AI-generated faces which strikes me as an informal litmus test of our humanity, or at least of neurotypical emotional response. Here’s how to work it.

1. Scroll through the mega-composite image at the top of the article — do it slowly, then quickly, then varying your speed — while listening to some emotionally triggering music, like, say, Max Richter’s Written on the Sky or On the Nature of Daylight. (Note: You have to be on the Times page to do that. But first click below to start the music. Or your own soundtrack selection.)
2. Watch what is happening in your emotional body. (That’s the body that diagrams like this one and research articles like this one attempt to map out.) If that body isn’t triggered — butterflies in your chest, throat tightening, eyes and facial muscles responding, mirror neurons alighting, spine tingling — then you may not be human.

The interesting thing is that the article doesn’t go into this at all — its point is practically the opposite (that AI-generated faces are never as real as the real thing). The effect I’m getting at arises at the point that these images become moving images (something I wrote a book about). It is in our response to the real-time micromovements in these faces — eyebrows being raised, pupils changing shape, moist glow entering the eyes, smile lifting around the mouth, et al. This is the movement of emotions evidenced in faces that trigger our own primal sociality.

The irony is that it may take unhumans like these AI-generated images to demonstrate our own humanity.

The music makes a difference as well (so choose accordingly), and it could be that my choice of Max Richter mirrors the effect I’m after in a pretty precise way. Richter’s music isolates the emotional micromovements of harmony and melody and repeats them incessantly, adding only simple variations, as if we were scrolling through them front and back until they have effortlessly lodged themselves into our unconscious.

Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about. (See how well you resist responding, say, by the 5 minute 40 second mark.)

A side-note: Having just watched the new documentary on Greta Thunberg, I Am Greta, it strikes me that there’s a lot to be said (and to be studied) about the impacts of viewing (and filming) the facial and emotional expressions of those we might care about — in this case, of the Asperger’s affected 16 year old climate activist, whose outsized dedication to her cause has been remarkable and whose influence has been equally that.

All of this is grist for the mill of my current book on the ontology of the (digital) image-world.