Massalia
AI Winter
2022–2024
Video (length 31 minutes)
Courtesy of the authors
The term ‘AI Winter’ describes periods of stagnation in artificial intelligence development, when hype and inflated expectations are dashed by technological dead ends, scepticism, and criticism, leading to a decline in interest in the field and cutbacks in funding – it all comes to a standstill. In this work the art group Massalia extrapolates the term from the technology itself and applies it to the cultural product being created.
The authors trained a neural network to generate texts in the spirit of classic Russian literature: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and others. However, the result is predictably banal: when imitating great literature the algorithm produces a generic text devoid of a genuine authorial voice, merely combining previously discovered forms in different ways.
The material for the generative description was a video of a textbook Russian winter landscape, filmed from a train travelling along the Trans-Siberian Railway. The train windows reveal the longest winter landscape in Russia. Hence the work consists of a layering of cultural tropes: stylisation imitating classical literature, the Russian winter, a journey along the Trans-Siberian Railway... Here the AI doesn’t expand horizons, but merely reproduces clichés.
