ART AND TECHNOLOGY

ARTIST, THIEF, OR PROGRAMMER

Gene Kogan and the problem of labor

By Alicia "Ace" Hodrick

Gene Kogan in the Gene Kogan Style

Gene Kogan is a self-proclaimed artist working in programming and AI technology. He creates installations and video loops. He’s not a gallery artist and releases most of his work through talks and lectures in which he explains his process as an AI Artist. If that feels a bit circular, it is. Various sites across the web label him an AI artist, or an artist who uses AI creatively and he was featured in Artnet's 2018 “most influential trailblazers” working in the intersection of AI and art. In other words, he has a presence, though his website has little information about his personal life and so in some ways, well, not much of a presence. We do know that he previously worked as a programmer before labeling himself an artist. Or as he likes to put it, “Engineer turned Artist." Not surprisingly, he sells many of his “Artworks” on Opensea.io, a site for NFTs and cryptocurrency.

Most of his work is dedicated to promoting AI as a tool, which is a common rhetoric these days. It's the flip-side of the understandable resistance to the way technology is quickly integrating itself into every aspect of society. The fact remains that we do not know the full extent of this technology because it’s still developing and we’re still understanding it. That said, Kogan is more of a teacher than an artist. Although he utilizes visual aesthetics, his overwhelming goal seems to be to promote AI in a positive light. What’s obvious is that he seems uneducated about how artists have historically been underpaid for their services.

The Arts and Crafts movement was a response to the Industrial Revolution and the commodification of products and we’ll probably get a similar response in the future, especially if the Kogans of the world keep on appropriating the work of others. We can infer about the dangers of AI by comparing this wave of automation to other initiatives to mechanize labor, such as the industrial revolution. Although we can continue on this path of technological advancement, I think that caution is warranted. 32 countries already have AI data centers in their communities. Although many countries still do not have the resources needed to implement this kind of technology, it’s hard to imagine that that will last for long.

One of the most significant ways we see AI being implemented is through casual media. You might go on TikTok or Instagram reels to find an off-putting AI video depicting a person doing a Mukbang and eating a whole chicken wing in one bite, bones and all. The programs that produce this content are Generative AI, and they typically require human input. They follow large language models that attempt to replicate human writing and speech. The growing popularity of AI has led many young people to turn these image generators into entertainment. This is what AI art is to a generation of users who are chronically online. People see these videos, typically created by people without artistic intent, and assume that this is what “AI Art” is all about. And it is, but it is other things, too.

Art?

In Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk, Kogan depicts 17 styled video feeds of the Tea Party and riddle scene from Disney’s 1951 animated film, Alice in Wonderland. He created these snippets by using other well-known works: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Music, Pink and Blue No. 2; Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave; and Frida Kahlo’s Portrait with Monkeys. He doesn’t alter these video feeds and even the clip from Alice in Wonderland appears as if it’s had a filter put over it. Copyright laws, particularly the fair-use doctrine, state that someone is permitted to use another artist’s work for the sake of criticism, comment, news reporting, scholarship, education, and research. Kogan’s claim that he’s primarily an educator shields him from copyright infringement and as long as he’s teaching, he can keep on "creating." Yet, when you look at his work, it is hard to view what he does as art and not just a horrible quoting of real art , which is in the end kind of bad, stolen art.

Cubist Art?

In Kogan’s installation piece, “Cubist Mirror," he invites users to look into the mirror and see themselves reflected in a cubist environment. The piece premiered in New York City at a conference on art & artificial intelligence in May of 2016. The style transfer code was implemented in Chainer by Yusuke Tomoto, based on the March 2016 paper by Johnson, Alahi, and Li called "Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution." So, clearly, Kogan’s “Cubist Mirror” has an educational component; however, that doesn’t take away from its artistic qualities, which are bad but significant.

Of course, the real issue is labor, something that is difficult to ascertain in Kogan’s work. Kogan’s art turns into a shell game: the “artist” role becomes the AI, and the “creator” simply becomes the programmer of bulky language models. That makes it impossible to quantify where and how much labor it takes to create Kogan’s work and furthermore it is difficult to even define what type of labor this is.

Real Labor

Most AI models currently operate under the Black Box Phenomenon, which essentially means that programs cannot articulate or demonstrate how they produce the work, or from a technical point of view, how input becomes output. Kogan isn’t able to use the logic applied by AI: that level of technology would give the bot entire autonomy over the outcome of the project. This is called ASI or Artificial Super Intelligence, which has not been produced; although, if I were a gambler, I’d bet that it’s right around the corner. Just think of NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI. Kogan has already taken advantage of these tools and happily claimed ownership of the products. There’s no doubt that these technological advances have upended all notions of labor as we know it, artistic or otherwise.

One

Kogan’s art is an endless string of references and stolen work. The claim that AI is just a tool that removes artists' labor from art is false. Even in the infancy stage of the AI technological revolution, you can already see the effects. NYT writer Noam Scheiber says “Human creatives have been replaced in significant numbers in industries ranging from graphics design, illustrations, to game design.” For now, Kogan is targeting famous artists, but what happens when Kogan and AI educators like him target artists in the first stages of their careers. Whatever the case, Kogan is clearly not educating us about the whole story, which is strange for a teacher.

Two

In Kogan's Experiments with Style Transfer, he experiments with AI style transfers using AI. He takes artworks like Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss and Leonard DaVinci’s The Mona Lisa, and uses them as filters for his video loops. A lot of Kogan's projects or work seems to teach students how to morph other media forms into new artwork. Kogan calls these his installations, but most of his labor is committed to learning code that anyone can input into deep learning programs. This makes him a programmer, not an artist. There are AI artists who use their own images to program language models. Kogan focuses on the technical aspects, and then he propagates these methods under the false guise of being an artist. He is not creating a new work, but stealing with new tools. Plenty of programmers build websites and design the layout for businesses, but these people are rarely called artists. They are web designers and even that is closer to art than what Kogan does.

Three

Kogan intends to teach his audience about the benefits of AI, but he takes on a romanticized view of the advantages without acknowledging the misuses and abuses of artistic labor. When advocating for AI as a tool, you should confront the consequences of the technology, especially if you use other people’s work to complete your own. What’s funny is that AI and artist-programmer-thieves like Kogan are just part of a long history of undervaluing the labor of artists.

The utopic goal of eliminating “grunt” work to AI labor is an interesting goal in a capitalist society. A world where people do not need to work, because labor is automated would flip our society on its head. But a world where our labor becomes even more alienated than it already is would keep the worst parts of Capitalism strong and standing while the artist and laborers become weaker and weaker.

©The CCA Arts Review and Alicia "Ace" Hodrick