SORRY I THOUGHT ABOUT FISHTANK AGAIN

WHOOPS

painting I made called ONLINE RITUAL GARDEN

Last night on Fishtank, contestants were taken into the confessional booth and asked to read from a script. The script is an audio training tool for a text-to-speech (TTS) AI computer program which is read aloud so the computer program has a catalog of phonemes to mimic a speaker’s voice.

portion of the painting The Confession by Giuseppe Molteni. Fishtank didn’t invent reality show confessionals but it is kinda funny how this religious ritual has transmogrified in reality television to something where a person sits alone in a room speaking to a camera: absolution through The Audience.

Jet Neptune, Sam Hyde’s protégé, the co-creator of Fishtank along with Hyde and its director, has told us, the audience, that in this season of Fishtank, the show’s producers have tried to convince the show’s contestants that the upcoming TTS messages come from an AI. We’ll see if this works, if the producers can keep up the façade that the live audience commentary is in fact just a computer program. I don’t know all of what the crew has planned; this season has already proven itself to have a bit more depth and polish than the previous seasons. I took a screen recording of one of the contestants training the AI TTS program because it kinda disturbed me, and it reminded me of the scene from Blade Runner 2049 where Ryan Gosling’s character (Literally You (and Me)) has to repeat phrases from a person? a computer program? to confirm that he is/not a replicant.

And then that got me thinking about hypnotic repetition, and then that got me thinking about recursion in computer programs. I’m just going to draw tenuous connections here, I don’t really care about laying down some cohesive mind-labyrinth for you to wander about. I am not good at computer programming, in college I had to work with a teaching assistant for every single assignment in a programming course and I straight up couldn’t do the final exam so I wrote an essay about the computer programs I would hypothetically write for the exam questions (I passed, and funnily enough, the essay probably would have been able to produce workable code with current AI). I am only bringing this up to let you know that what I am saying might just be retarded.

One of the simplest forms of programming logic is the “if-then” statement. The computer program checks some parameter, typically millions or billions of times per second, and some part of the code is executed (then) if some parameter is met. There are other forms of computer logic but it seems fundamental, to me, a retard, that in a computer, something is repeated millions of times per second, all the time. Now, I wouldn’t go as far as saying that, therefore, computer programs are always placing you under hypnosis but I wouldn’t exactly disagree with someone saying that. And there’s part of me which feels positive emotional valence for repetition in general: regular exercise is good, praising God and life is good, repetition is not just some tool of computers and hypnosis and mind control.

Man is not a machine, he is not a computer, but it’s really easy to fall for that illusion. A person can be brainwashed through hypnotic repetition, and we see here in the clip of the Fishtank contestant training a computer program to mimic her voice, that the computer is similarly trained through repetition. (But maybe that’s because the computer was made according to Man’s logic: we can be trained through repetition and we have quantified and abstracted time such that repetitious if-then statements are logical according to these abstractions.)

SPOILERS FOR BLADE RUNNER 2049 BELOW

Some of the drama of Blade Runner 2049 comes from unraveling the mystery of Ryan Gosling’s character, K: is he a replicant or a human? Eventually, we find out that K is a replicant, his dreams and memories have been manufactured, and while this is initially distressing and torturous to K, by the film’s conclusion, it appears that K has found peace because regardless of the fact that he is a replicant, he made a choice. This is a somewhat common theme across art exploring man’s relationship with computers: free will is the major deciding factor that determines humanity. With that in mind, if a person could reach a state where he no longer has free will, where he is a machine responding to stimuli, then would it make sense to think of him as a person anymore? Might it be much easier to turn a man into a machine than the other way around?

Here, I wanted to insert another clip from Fishtank last night, but I can’t find it anywhere (if I do I will update this article with the clip). The show’s producers set up a scene for a couple of contestants, a common reality show occurrence, but in this scene, a producer tells one of the contestants to eat food off of the floor (because, the producer tells this contestant, in the final edit of the show, his “character” is “quirky”). The contestant goes through with the scene (in fact, he does multiple takes) but it made me wonder: would I do that? On one level, the scene is clearly commentary on the depths into which one will sink for “fame” (and, honestly, this level of depravity is quite mild for Fishtank standards). And I also wondered: did he have a choice? If he did choose to eat food off the floor then that reflects poorly on his character (but he’s a reality show contestant, there is probably a minimum level of narcissism and resistance to shame required to go on a reality show, at all) and if he didn’t “choose,” if he’s so socially conditioned by producers as authority figures and a desire to play along for fame that he simply had to eat the food off the floor, he would have done anything the producers told him to do, then is he even a person with free will anymore? What’s the inverse of the Turning Test?

That question isn’t rhetorical and I have an answer. I think the answer to that question, what’s the inverse Turing Test, or, phrased differently: how do you determine that a person is not a computer, is dependent on contemporary social mores, the answer to that question will probably change over time, but it will be (and is) probably important to consider. Can you say the n-word? That’s it. That’s the inverse Turning Test right now. One of the Fishtank contestants, Luke, (now former contestant, he got eliminated while I was writing this article) was kicked off of the reality show Big Brother for saying “nigga.” (this is, in part, why he was invited onto Fishtank. He was a producer plant on Fishtank and also one of those rare humans on reality television.) I’m not trying to be crass or funny even though what I am saying is crass and possibly funny. A person who is completely infected by ideology is basically a computer program (if n-word said, then bad person (and against whom basically anything is justified)), their responses to various stimuli are totally predictable (like a machine), they lack the free will to even say a particular word because their programming does not allow it. (Maybe it’s more generous to say they are hypnotized or under a spell.) Tigger-words as a catalyst for some kind of post-hypnotic suggestion are considered “speculative fiction”—I dunno about you but I’ve seen people do insane acts at the utterance of a particular word pretty regularly.