Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

While seemingly harmless, the discourse surrounding (Generative Adversarial Networks) GAN art limits a comprehensive understanding of the technology and in doing so mystifies it, contributing to an ideology that protects AI software as an elite tool. The purpose of this research is to parse how GAN art fits into a broader web of technology, culture, and socio-economic power. My methods are qualitative in that they do not rely on numerical data. My methods primarily focus on analysis of existing literature. This exploration was initially inspired by my own experiential research using GAN image generating software. This paper researches and analyzes criticism and reviews of GAN art to identify trends of anthropomorphizing language in the literature. This is contextualized with Marxist theory to identify a larger pattern of anthropomorphizing rhetoric to describe artificial intelligence in a wider field of discourse. This is connected to the increasingly prominent role that artificial intelligence software plays in our world. Ultimately, this research finds that GAN art anthropomorphizing rhetoric of its discourse contributes, if only modestly, to a broader ideological pattern of mystification that keeps AI software poorly understood, yet powerfully influential.