The article opens by discussing that batshit crazy "Trump Gaza" A.I. video. Then, from the middle of the article:
Given how recently generative A.I. developed, it’s remarkable how fast its aesthetic hallmarks have become recognizable: high-contrast textures, perceptibly diffuse lighting, forced-perspective shots in which people walk down city streets or through arched openings. It’s not what dreams look like so much as a visual rendering of a dream’s description, complete with mild failures of object permanence and the sense that we have seen it all before, although it didn’t look like that.
As soon as this visual style became familiar, it seemed to become the dominant aesthetic of the pro-Trump internet. With the possible exception of venture capitalists, the demographic that appears to have embraced A.I. most enthusiastically is MAGA meme accounts, possibly because the people who have most loudly rejected it — graphic designers, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, teachers — are archetypal liberals. In the reactive logic of the MAGA rank and file, A.I. is good because the right people hate it.
This dynamic has produced a culture of computer-generated irony with peculiar characteristics. It is not the stable irony of a Jonathan Swift or a Stephen Colbert, in which the audience can rely on the ironist to say the opposite of what he means. Instead it is an unstable irony that leaves its real meaning ambiguous or at least plausibly deniable. President Trump himself popularized this approach by “telling it like it is” in a way that consistently disregards precision if not accuracy, speaking in a hyperbolic style that his followers understand to be not literal but also gospel truth. The Trump Gaza video is ironic in this slippery sense of the word. It’s the irony of saying more than you mean (literal golden idol of Trump), or saying what you mean in a way no one could call serious (the twice-stereotyped belly dancers), or calling attention to your leader’s weak points as a gesture of unconditional loyalty (gold-leaf everything).
This is the irony that means figuratively the same thing it says literally, but in some different way that is never explained — the irony of the man who calls his wife fat and then complains she can’t take a joke. Solo Avital and Ariel Vromen, the Los Angeles-based Israeli producers who generated Trump Gaza, neatly captured this rhetorical position when they told NBC that their video was satire but also not necessarily critical of Trump’s proposal. In other words, unstable irony has given them a way to agree with the president even though they know he is wrong.
Ethnically cleansing Gaza in order to develop it as a resort property may be the dumbest and most venal idea Trump has ever had. That’s the point. It’s not that the denizens of the MAGA internet fail to realize such an idea is bad; it’s that they’re keenly aware that other people think they don’t realize it’s bad, so they play into that perception in order to become knowing. It’s punk rock, kitsch, trolling: the art of making something so stupid that other members of your subculture experience it as smart.
I would add that the crazy hype that surrounds generative A.I. seems to me of a piece with the craziness that surrounds and supports Trump, not to mention Elon. They are of the same cultural formation. And, alas, they out of touch with reality.
Degenerate.
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