Musings on what we lose in Web 2.0 and 3.0
I read Olia Lialina's From My to Me this morning, and I was struck by her point that "no-coding-required" website design tools took something from us - the artistic tools required to do anything our hearts desired on "our own" webpages. Rather, we're limited by the tools and templates provided.
Whatever we make will fall within the boundaries of what the service's creators think "a webpage" should look like. These boundaries may be flexible, but they exist. They constrain our options, and they also train us to believe "a webpage" can only look like one thing or one range of things.
Lialina discusses this to emphasize how Wordpress downplays and even destroys hyperlinks. I, however, immediately thought of AI.
Suppose fifty people in a room were all asked to make an image of a "purple kitten with yarn ball." We'd undoubtedly get fifty variations on this theme, some of them way out there. We'd see a variety of media and interpretations. We could, and probably would, discuss how easy or difficult certain media were to use. We'd almost certainly discuss whether some interpretations were more effective than others, and we'd inevitably ask "More effective at what?"
Now compare this to AI-generated images.
When someone types "purple kitten with yarn ball" into an AI generator, they may well get an image of a purple kitten with a yarn ball. Yet this image does not encompass all possible interpretations of the prompt. It encompasses only the training data tagged "purple," "kitten," "yarn," and/or "ball."
In short, the generated image is, and will only ever be, within the bounds of what the system is trained to tell us a purple kitten with yarn ball should look like.
The prompt-typer will never get the "purple kitten with yarn ball" inside their own head. They can't. The AI cannot produce it. The AI can only keep us within the AI's own boundaries. Ultimately, the AI can only train us to believe a "purple kitten with yarn ball" - or any other prompt - looks like a certain thing.
There's no discussion, no media, no debating effectiveness or asking who the target audience is or to what extent the artist succeeded at communicating with that audience. There's no there there.
I built my Big Professional Blog in Wordpress. When I started, Wordpress would provide access to the raw CSS and HTML with the click of a button. I loved this feature and used it frequently.
A few years ago, Wordpress went to "block editing." Block editing treats everything on the screen as an "element" you can change by choosing from a lengthy menu.
I don't know whether this was actually meant to help users or was just a way to make people spend more time in the CMS. I do know that access to the original (perfectly functional) WYSIWYG editor became buried in some obscure menu, and access to the raw HTML got even further away. Even I stopped accessing the HTML for a few years, because the hassle wasn't worth it.
...Just typing that gives me pause. Accessing the HTML on my own website wasn't worth it to me? This is what Wordpress stuck me with?? And I accepted it???
Yeah. No. I'm done with that. Give me back my tools; I want to make art.