@viennawriter@literatur.social today recorded a conversation with me for their podcast (link will be supplied), in our conversation, i followed one of those thought-rabbits that tend to pop up down it’s hole. the result looked promising enough to write a short blog about the aesthetics of generating media.
this starts at a point where a colleague, a couple of weeks ago, asked my about an effect they observed. when they generated some text with chatGPT, they were always impressed with the result; when they read the same text two days later, they found it boring, bland, and disappointing. they asked my if i had experienced that effect, and if i shared it.
intermission: aesthetics
to understand where i am going with this, i need to explain a bit about aethetics. usually, when we talk about aesthetics, we talk about vision: seeing things that are beautiful. in everyday language, aesthetic and beautiful are often interchangeable.
jonas löwgren helped me understand aesthetics in interaction design. when an interaction feels good, eg. fluid, in control (ii can only recommend that you read this article [1] yourself, it is really spot-on). in this article, jonas quotes paul hekkert [2]: »we experience sensuous delight,meaningful interpretation and emotional involvement as a unity«. hekkert argues from a perspective of evolutionary psychology that we enjoy experiences – i.e. label them as aesthetic experiences – that »[…] are beneficial for the development of the senses' functioning and our survival in general«.
he goes on to identify four principles that describe these experiences. the first one is. »maximum effect for minimum means: […] We like to invest a minimal amount of means, such as effort, resources, brain capacity, to attain the highest possible effect, in terms of survival, reproduction, learning or explaining«.
so what is going on here?
now imagine a situation where somebody has to write a tedious email to the professor, asking them to extend a deadline; or a 500-word essay about the manipulative power of the double bind; or a half-page summary of a book they didn’t like. now enter chatGPT, and with astounding ease, they land in the sweet spot of maximum effect for minimum means. instead of an hour of dreadful text wrangling, of writing and rewriting and always finding new faults in their own writing, they have an acceptable text within a few minutes.
so, chatGPT enables us to create an impressive result using the least posssible effort, and we have an aesthetic experience. going to the first quote above, »we experience sensuous delight,meaningful interpretation and emotional involvement as a unity« suggests that this aethetics experience is at the same time delightful, meaningful and emotional.
in other words: our aesthetic experience makes it easy for us to like the result; two days later, devoid of the experience, we see the text as what it really is: bland, boring and disappointing.
somebody should write a paper about this :)
ps: starting with this text, i will no longer use genAI to create silly images; instead, i am challenging myself to find a photo that i took myself that has the same absurd feeling of being suitable as the header image for my blog (the sushi-remote-rubber-band).
1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220590252_Toward_an_articulation_of_interaction_esthetics