Mortal Myths for Machine Minds

Dissection and Articulation
Engineering is about universalizable
things like effectiveness, rationality,
and algorithms, while culture is
about subjective and particular
things, like taste, creativity, and
artistic expression. Technology and
culture seem like an uneasy mix.
Yet, in spite of their reputations,
technology and culture are
increasingly intertwined.
Roland Barthes describes the
basic actions of structuralism
in “The Structuralist Activity” as
“dissection,” by which an object is
broken up into parts (mythemes,
phonemes, themes, etc.) and
“articulation,” by which those parts
are reorganized into relations
with each other. In 2014 Netflix
(indirectly or otherwise) performed
this process of dissection and
articulation when building its genre
naming algorithm. Genres with
hyper-specific names like “Visuallystriking
Foreign Nostalgic Dramas”
or “Critically-acclaimed Emotional
Underdog Movies” are generated
by dissecting mountains of cultural
data and articulating it using the
following formula:
Region + Adjectives + Noun Genre
+ Based On... + Set In... + From
the... + About... + For Age X to Y
80,000 genres were formed from
these basic components to allow
greater suggestion accuracy and
to decide which types of shows
to produce. 4 years later, and
this type of content-suggestion
formula looks archaic. “AI” (neural
networks) can create maps of
cultural ideas spanning millions of
sub-genres and use formulas too
complex for even their own coders
to fully understand. Abstract
cultural ideas are no longer solely
the remit of humans beings.
Above: Illustration by “Darth” parodying the
plethora of niche and unusual genres on Netflix.
Still in Diapers
James Bridle discusses the impact
of automation and AI on culture in
his blog, “The New Aesthetic”. The
example on the left shows how
automation is being used to design
products, to completely bizarre
effect. It’s interesting to see how
badly computers fail. Some would
hold this up as an example of how
“unintelligent” computers are, but
you could simply consider this “AI
in it’s infancy”. Just like a child trying
to make up a joke and spouting
un-funny nonsense; AI has some
of the constituent parts but lacks
nuanced understanding. It needs
to grow up before it can create
compelling cultural artefacts.
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