Model Collapse: Art, AI, and the Seductions of Hallucination
This special event with Kris Paulsen is co-hosted by UW-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) and UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities as part of a collaborative research initiative on Aesthetics, Art, and AI with support from the Consortium for Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI).
It has become commonplace to describe machine learning and generative AI systems as prone to “hallucination.” That is, they confabulate statements or documents that appear convincing or “truth apt,” while in fact, they are merely statistically probable. While developers typically frame hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) as a bug to be fixed or a problem to be mitigated, image generation tools are designed to “make things up.” The very same processes that produce accurate information with generative tools also conjure the “hallucinations.” This talk explores the ways in which artists working with various forms of generative AI seek out hallucination for a range of effects—critical, manipulative, or revelatory—and how these affect our relationships to and trust in the archive.
Dr. Kris Paulsen is Associate Professor in the Departments of History of Art and Theater, Film, and Media Arts at The Ohio State University. Her work traces the intersections of art and engineering, with a particular emphasis on telepresence, virtuality, and artificial intelligence. She is the author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (MIT Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and essays on contemporary art and new media, which have appeared in publications such as October, Representations, Media-N, Signs and Society, BOMB, Mousse, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and X-TRA, and in exhibition catalogues for Zach Blas, Sarah Rosalena, Ann Hamilton, and Katherine Behar, among others.
About the Center for 21st Century Studies: UW-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies fosters innovative research and community engagement at the intersection of the humanities, arts, and sciences. C21 provides multiple points of access and honors multiple ways of knowing through fellowships, project support, and programming.