Gag Reflex: Choking on AI

So-called artificial intelligence—in the form of chatbots, “machine learning” and image generators—is a product of joke culture. The training data sets gobbled meme culture through Reddit, and that reliable-enough parody of an encyclopaedia called Wikipedia. Art in modernity, David W. Galenson argues in Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art, flirts indelibly with unseriousness by abandoning academic conventions and the conceit of edifying subject matter. AI art objects today, are less the ‘gimmick’ that some have observed and more in the ‘trickster’, eluding judgment while ensnaring the all-too-knowing critic and naïve audience alike in something resembling a ‘con’.