Creative endings: visual cultures, generative AI & machinic intuitions

Abstract

The widespread use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), a form of AI that produces images, videos and other digital artefacts, poses a potentially decisive challenge to the ideal that artistic creativity is the sole preserve of humans. This challenge is personified in the post-human, apparently intuitive level of creative thinking that we encounter in Ava (Alicia Vikander), the central character in Ex Machina (Dir. Alex Garland, 2014). An AI seemingly on the verge of attaining Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Ava substantiates her creative impulses through a series of drawings. In keeping with Vilém Flusser’s theory of ‘technical’ images, her drawings can be understood to be the output of an artificially intelligent apparatus that, through computational means, simulates human innovation. Ava’s drawings, however, are not machinic anomalies nor odd contrivances that demonstrate a computational prowess. They are, on the contrary, exemplary paradigms of how we produce images today. Ava’s creativity does not, this article will propose, present either a threat or a challenge to the ideal of human ingenuity. Rather, she demonstrates the increasingly mechanistic conditioning of human creativity and, in turn, illuminates the uncanniness of image production in our algorithmic age.