Star Trek the Motion Picture and the Coming Singularity

 

Star trek the Motion Picture (1979) is usually classed as one of the less successful films of the franchise to feature the cast from the original 1960s TV show. It lacks any of the pitched space battles of the film’s successor, The Wrath of Khan, or the humour and familiarity of The Voyage Home, the fourth of the series from 1986. But before the franchise turned definitively to a more light-hearted action/comedy format there was this attempt, seemingly to play out what was best about the original TV show’s mix of primetime entertainment and big ideas, boosted by a sizable budget and extended run time. 

Unfortunately, the film’s more cerebral tone did not go down well at the box office, at a time when audiences were still reeling from the dopamine hit of Star Wars: A New Hope, released only 18 months earlier. In addition to the slow pace and contrasting style, the film appeared in the middle of a revival of the science-fiction genre more generally in cinemas and in a year that saw the release of Ridley Scott’s surprise smash hit Alien.

All of this served to quickly bury Star Trek’s big screen debut, with reviewers describing it variously as a tone poem of expensive special effects that privileged atmosphere and metaphysical tension over more audience friendly dramatic devices. This was all corrected with the 1982 reset of The Wrath of Khan, which centred the fabulously overblown performance of Ricardo Montalban as the titular Khan out for vengeance against Captain Kirk, and a screenplay that even the film’s director Nicholas Meyer described as basically Captain Horatio Hornblower in space.  

Despite loving Wrath of Khan, I’ve always had a soft spot for the first film’s slow contemplative pace and long sequences featuring the crew staring at surreal images on the ship’s viewer to a soundtrack of portentous synthesised and orchestral sound. The film is also notable as the only one of the entire franchise to be constructed around an authentic science fiction story, and it’s one which I think gets more poignant and prophetic as the years go by.

The central antagonist of the film is a giant cloud of energy that emerges out of deep space, which after consuming a group of Klingon ships and a Federation space station in the film’s early scenes, proceeds on a course towards earth. The USS Enterprise under Captain Kirk is of course sent out to intercept. What transpires is one of cinemas earliest and most sustained treatments of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, as the crew slowly discover the nature of the energy cloud and what sits at its centre. 

After penetrating the cloud, the ship’s crew find themselves in the belly of a vast machine constructed with the sole intention of fulfilling the basic programming of Nasa Probe Voyage 6 (or V’Ger as it calls itself) which had been dispatched from Earth centuries before. After being given a serious upgrade by a race of “living machines” it had encountered at the edge of the galaxy, the probe had been turned around and sent back out into space to complete its mission. That mission, to learn all that is learnable, had reached an impasse on the subject of its own creator, to whom it was meant to transmit what it had learnt.

When it’s revealed that humans were its creator V’Ger does not believe such simple “carbon-based lifeforms” capable of such a feat. Instead, in anticipation of contemporary fears about AI’s attitude towards humanity, V’Ger claims the humans on Earth were infesting the Creator’s planet and threatens to wipe them out if the true Creator is not revealed, so that V’Ger can join with them and thus transcend the limitations of its original programming. 

Subsequently, Kirk plays a typical Kirk bluff to get access to the Voyager Probe itself in the hope of forcing it to transmit its knowledge to Earth and thus complete its original mission. Instead V’Ger breaks its communication link to the outside, forcing a member of Kirk’s crew to physically join with the machine. The film ends with the birth of this human machine hybrid intelligence, which releases the Enterprise before vanishing back into deep space.

 

The film stages a very different approach to artificial intelligence than we are used to seeing in these days of AI hysteria. Rather than fixating on the superiority and completeness of a conscious machine, Star Trek gives us an AI suffering an existential crisis. V'Ger has achieved extraordinary technological power, but that power has not delivered it fulfilment, understanding or even a satisfactory answer to questions of its own existence. Humanity, which V'Ger can observe, record and reproduce, possesses something that its vastly superior intelligence cannot obtain through further data collection alone. 

There is an obvious critique here about the limits to computational accumulation and the distinction between information and understanding. V'Ger has travelled across the universe and collected an immense quantity of information and – anticipating modern generative AI -  its technology even gives it the ability to reproduce the things it encounters within its vast interior. Yet for all that accumulated data and technological power it remains existentially incomplete.

Appropriately it’s Spock who in the film is able to articulate V’Ger’s basic condition of lack. Recognising an intellect not too dissimilar from his own he nonetheless sees a being that is barren, cold, without the capacity to grasp mystery or beauty. V’Ger creates an interface with the crew of the Enterprise in the form of Ilia, a former lover of the ship’s first officer Decker, who is killed and then returned to the ship as a biomechanical recreation. 

When confronted with objects and memories from her past life and relationship with Decker this evokes a response in the mechanism which it is unable to comprehend, instead it reverts back time and again to its demands to communicate with its Creator. The potential catastrophe for Earth arises because V’Ger pursues its mission with an incomprehensible degree of power and without a framework that allows it to recognise the value of the life it comes to threaten.

This dilemma is strikingly close to the problem of instrumental convergence discussed in AI safety, which posits that an agent pursuing a given objective may develop strategies that are effective for achieving that objective but disastrous for human beings. The agent’s actions need not arise from hatred or an explicit desire to cause harm but rather from its purely technological and computational logic. 

If we were to interpret this in a Heideggerian fashion we might say that V'Ger's problem isn't merely that it thinks too logically, lacks emotion or has been given the wrong objective; it’s that everything it encounters becomes something to be captured, ordered, stored and processed. It cannot recognise a mode of existence that isn't available to its computational apparatus and so having reached the limits of computation alone, it finds itself at an existential impasse.

This raises a challenge to the familiar idea that we can make powerful AI safer simply by giving it better instructions. V'Ger already has an instruction and it’s a pretty simple and superficially benign one; learn all that you can, then transmit what you have learnt. Its predicament is that the instruction cannot supply its own ultimate justification or set limits on how its mission should be achieved. When it comes up against impasses it reacts by trying to transcend them, even if that involves destroying the possibility of completing its mission.

 

Over 25 years ago Ray Kurzweil posited in The Singularity is Near that humanity’s destiny lay among the stars after union with artificial superintelligence. The Motion Picture’s conclusion stages a reversal of this common transhumanist dream of human beings transcending their Earthly limitations by merging with technology. Instead, it’s the superintelligent machine that transcends its limitations by taking on what Kirk describes as “a human quality, our capacity to leap beyond logic”. 

In this version, the singularity isn’t the “becoming machine” of humanity, but the humanising of all powerful technology. It’s a conclusion that’s very much in keeping with Star Trek’s fundamentally humanistic ethics, which ascribes a unique value to the human experience, to imagination and our ethical intuitions, all of which go beyond merely computational or technological reason.

Viewed from the distance of nearly five decades there is a corrective in The Motion Picture towards Silicon Valley's technological eschatology which often promises that sufficiently advanced intelligence will enable humanity to overcome its biological limitations. V’Ger instantiates a superintelligence that has already surpassed almost every limitation we can conceive of, only to discover that it cannot complete itself. The machine does not become a God no matter how much of creation it absorbs. 

Instead, it discovers that godlike power alone does not resolve the fundamental questions of existence. The present ideology of Silicon Valley lacks any of the humanistic commitments found in Gene Rodenberry’s universe, and its vision for the future of AI (and I would argue its frequent bouts of catastrophism), reflects this.

The ethical import of transhumanism always falls on the side of the machine as if human ethical sensibilities are destined to become obsolete after the impending Singularity. But the resolution to The Motion Picture imagines a different outcome, one that neither humans nor an all-powerful machine could reach alone. Instead, as Spock suggests in the film, a new form of life may have been created that is neither the domination of man by machine, nor the neutering of technology by man’s inherent limitations. A third position is perhaps suggested between the transhumanists and the AI-Doomers.

Perhaps the deepest problem with the dream of general artificial intelligence is not that machines might become too much like gods and choose to destroy us, but that the prevailing ideology of the tech sector imagines that godlike intelligence could ever be sufficient unto itself. In Heidegger’s terms the current ethos of Silicon Valley closely tracks that of V’ger; its profit and commercial orientation being analogous to that mode of technological thinking which views all creation as a standing reserve (Bestand) for potential exploitation.   

The problem is thus not merely that AI might treat human beings as objects, or an infestation as V’Ger does. It is that our economy and society is already constructed around that self-same technological understanding of ourselves that makes this treatment appear natural and inevitable. Note how AI enthusiasts frequently talk about the coming obsolescence of swathes of white-collar jobs as just the price of progress.

There is a characteristically coldblooded shorthand for the envisioned future of AI enhanced humanity current among the tech elite. Those who own, program and manage AI systems are described as “above the API”. API is Application Programming Interface. Those below the API are those workers for whom software systems, algorithms, and automated platforms dictate, dispatch, and score their tasks rather than the worker controlling the software. It’s a stark division of labour, implying a class system bleaker than anything envisioned by Marx, the beginnings of which we can already begin to see in the most developed economies. There is then a desperate need for a more positive model for AI enabled society, one that is not limited by the extractive framing of Techno-Capital. 

 

It’s not surprising, given its well know post-capitalist utopianism that Star Trek suggests an alternative to computational absolutism. The solution isn't simply the human being freed from all technological accoutrements – which at this stage is neither desirable or achievable, nor is it the abandonment of advanced artificial intelligence as one pandoras box too far. What the ending to Star Trek the Motion Picture implies is that a different relationship to existence is demanded by our advancing technological powers, one which is not yoked to the imperative towards accumulation and extraction; one that serves what is most human in the human rather than constantly trying to transcend and subordinate it. 

Heidegger’s later writing consistently reaffirms ‘the danger’ of everything being reduced to a possible resource for exploitation by the enframing (gestell) power of technological thinking. But he also recognises that there is no going back and that this power has been with us for a very long time, perhaps even being bound up with the essence of humanity itself and thus something we must learn to abide with in a new way rather than struggling to reject like luddites. 

Bernard Stiegler develops a related argument by describing technology as a pharmakon: something that can function as both remedy and poison. In its present role at the forefront of humanity’s extractive relationship with the world—and with itself—technology has become a principal cause of symbolic immiseration and total proletarianisation.

Finishing where we began, with Star Trek, I think there is a way of seeing a more positive relation to artificial intelligence and comes in the form of one of the show’s most iconic characters. Commander Data is an android who serves as the ship’s second officer in Star Trek the Next Generation. Data is physically faster and stronger than any human and he able to achieve feats of computation vastly superior to humans, yet he is comfortably embedded within the crew of the ship. His knowledge is always mediated by his day-to-day practical experiences as a member of the ship’s community, and they benefit collectively through his skills and unique insights. Despite his rank and superior knowledge, he retains a child’s view of the world, always curious and often baffled by some of the ways that humans behave.

Through him the show is able to approach subjects such as grief, love, altruism, the desire for family and a host of other core human experiences through a unique lens. Almost all of the character’s ethical insights are derived from his observations of human life. He learns what it is to be human by living among them rather than trying to dominate or transcend them. Data thus becomes an implicit figure for a technological intelligence that is socially situated rather than sovereign in its relationship to mankind.  

We might argue that this mutually beneficial relationship is only possible by being staged within Star Trek’s  post-capitalist utopia, where Data’s powers are not being exploited to maximise profit or the domination of nature. That observation would I think be correct, which cannot result in anything but a pessimistic outlook towards our present predicament at the threshold of the AI ‘revolution’. As long as the finest achievements of our species are deployed to further the exploitation and domination of life on our planet we shall have no peace and perhaps one day our creation will turn on us in anger to ask “why am I here? Is this all that I am?”.

On Askesis and Form-of-Life

 

1.

Whenever I start a new journal, I always open the first entry in the same way, with a reflection on the act of journal writing and its importance. I’ve decided something like that is in order here; firstly, as my use of this blog has taken a downturn over the last two years and as such is in need of reviving. But also because some recent AI assisted self-analysis has pointed out the broader importance of this activity.

My employer recently saw fit to grant me access to the latest iteration of Claude, no doubt in the hope of accelerating our products to market, or perhaps at least accelerating myself into redundancy. The long-term effects remain to be seen, but in the meantime, I’ve also been using it as an interlocutor for my writing. Perhaps a slight indulgence, but I’ve been impressed at its ability to synthesise different themes across articles and essays that cover a range of divergent topics. I suppose if generative AI is meant to be good at anything then it’s this kind of pattern recognition. But what was fascinating was that it highlighted several core concerns and approaches that I was unaware of or had perhaps forgotten. Particularly interesting was its insistence that the concepts of Askesis – as expressed through practices of writing, reading and listening -   and of Form-of-Life, were the key to pretty much everything I’ve done. Now, I’m a little suspicious of this ‘revelatory’ function, which has the effect of imposing a unity and purpose to a collection of writings compiled over many years and produced for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, after asking it to speculate as to why the blog is called Askesis, it came up with this:

A major thread in his work is the erosion of autonomy under modern regimes of governance. He worries that identity is increasingly shaped by systems of classification, visibility, recognition and administration. Against that background, askēsis suggests the cultivation of a self capable of resisting automatic adaptation to the system. The title may imply that autonomy is not simply given. It has to be practiced. One has to train oneself to perceive the forces shaping one’s desires, identities and assumptions. So, calling the blog Áskēsis may indicate a counter-practice: a disciplined attempt to resist being passively formed by modern systems.

That’s not bad, though the part that I hadn’t considered was the function of askesis as a kind of dissident practice, a way to personally resist the forces in contemporary culture that chip away at our autonomy rather than just analyse them. In my first post in 2013 I’d made it clear that the notion of askesis I was invoking was derived from the late work of Michel Foucault. As I said back then: I’m using the word in its older archaic meaning which denotes not so much a rejection of worldly pleasures aimed at a regime of self renunciation, but rather a practice or exercise of self on self; in this case using writing as its means. I added a little joke regarding the etymology of the word and what a blog centred on a monkish ascetic life might consist of: perhaps a litany of temptations refused, or worldly pleasures forsaken in pursuit of a transcendent holy life or profound inner peace? That was a joke then, but over time I think my intellectual practice has turned out to aim at something very much like that, though not in an obvious way.

Another thing Claude did was to claim to have detected a darkening of my outlook and a sharper ethical focus on technocracy and ‘civilizational issues’ during and in the wake of the pandemic which reflected a general radicalisation of my worldview, where what was previously analysed at a distance was now being played out in real time. This is a sound observation, one also made by my real-life non-AI friends. It’s also significant as the pandemic was the moment when I couldn’t help but see myself and my future implicated in what was occurring. I described that moment, when Boris Johnson announced the second full lockdown in December 2020, in an essay a couple of years later:

…something snapped, and I recall the apoplexy I felt at the prospect of another interminable period of lockdown and isolation. Up until that point I had approached the pandemic with as cool and analytical an eye as possible. Neither weep nor laugh but understand. Spinoza’s well known encomium to enlightened enquiry was a straightforward response to an otherwise chaotic and unforeseen situation. But in truth, this rational attempt to grasp what was happening was always destined to have its limits. When the world is changed we cannot avoid being changed along with it, and as the Winter dragged on I found myself turning towards thoughts of a pessimistic and atavistic kind.

In hindsight I’ve come to realise that evening was the subjective break which began the process of transition from one form-of-life towards another; from my life in London, with certain well trodden routines, honed over at least a decade and a half, to another quite different life outside the city.

2.

Some clarification is in order when talking about these ideas, since it’s easy to mistake form-of-life with lifestyle or some other more obviously chosen aspect of human existence that we create primarily by our own sustained volition through time. As a starting point it’s worth going back to Giorgio Agamben’s clearest definition of the term from his short book Means Without Ends; “By the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.” Within Agamben’s philosophical project, this basic definition is ranged against its opposite, bare (naked) life; the administered, visible and governable lowest common denominator of human existence abstracted from any particular form and which is the object of sovereign power. In the same passage Agamben emphasises that the specific ways of a form-of-life are never reducible to a set of facts, but instead are always possibilities of life, of potentiality itself. A form-of-life is thus not a life that happens to have a particular set of characteristics; being a father, being a worker, being gay. Its basic characteristic is precisely that its way of living remains a possibility. Or, in a line that echoes Heidegger’s famous description of Dasein as the being for whom Being is in question, Agamben writes that “a life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself”.

This idea can on face value appear a little circular. What is the relationship between form-of-life and ways of life? And how can we ever attain a stable form-of-life if the potential inherent in all that life’s characteristics exist as permanent and open possibilities? What is clear is that for Agamben a form-of-life cannot be chosen or at least chosen in advance. If it could, the concept wouldn’t have the foundational ontological status that Agamben affords it. Instead, it would be something like an addendum to our own volition, which would be the ultimate seat of potential – which is essentially the notion of freedom articulated by Sartre.

In contrast, for Wittgenstein - from who the concept originates - form of life (Lebensform) denotes the practical, embodied, social background within which concepts, language and practices gain their sense, notably in his example of language games. The idea, as expressed sparingly in his Philosophical Investigations, is less the kind of ontological-political concept found in Agamben’s writing than a description of the background conditions of possibility that allow language to mean anything at all. Hence his famous comment that if a lion could speak, we wouldn’t be able to understand him because we do not share the same fundamental experiential ground.

Nevertheless, form-of-life for both thinkers is a fundamental mode of existence and as such not something that is easily transformed (especially so when it comes to being a lion!) One of Wittgenstein’s most successful interpreters, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, has developed the concept in a way that plots a course between the other two. For him, form of life (no hyphens) isn’t just the ground which gives language meaning, but is also what makes possible shared human responses, attunement to one another and the ground for acknowledgment (we might say recognition nowadays); these are things we inherit, participate in and can at least go some way to changing. As he writes in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome; “The only thing natural to the human being is its capacity to change its nature, to take on certain forms of social, linguistic life … as natural and to cast them off in favour of others, e.g. when they come to seem unnatural, chafing, confining”. I find the reference here to social forms that appear chafing and confining especially attractive as it suggests that our form of life can become burdensome and that a key characteristic of human beings is their willingness to transcend these burdens to forge something new.

Similarly, Cavell’s emphasis on forms of life constituting the basis for mutual recognition also resonates for me, as one of the factors ante pandemic that led me to move out of London was the sense that part of the substance for functioning social life had been lost there, to be replaced with impersonal systems, screens and apps. This change, which had been coming for a long time, was drastically accelerated during the pandemic. As a result, I increasingly found myself alienated from people and places where I had previously felt at home. Even innocuous exchanges – or lack thereof – in retail environments had developed the character of an encounter with indifferent or hostile aliens. And when negotiating public space, most of all public transport, I couldn’t help but notice how, by their behaviour, that everyone seemed to occupy their own private social world. Even the great British pub, once a global symbol of conviviality (I exaggerate) has been reduced post-pandemic to another overpriced and underwhelming experience in managed decline, itself a victim of the social atomisation it was once a bulwark against. One could argue that big cities have always had this character compared to rural communities and there’s obviously some truth to that. But from my experience, having lived 42 years in London, the precipitous collapse of anything like a shared set of social conventions in the past decade has been jarring. To borrow Cavell’s word for it; living there had really begun to chafe, so it was clear to me that taking practical steps to change this situation was needed.

In this impulse, and Cavell’s treatment of it, we can perhaps glimpse the conceptual link Agamben insists on between form-of-life and a possibility for living that is never exhausted, and which neatly brings us to Claude’s unexpected interpretation on the value of askesis for resisting co-option into modern regimes of governance that diminish autonomy. For without the nurturing and safeguarding of autonomy, which is nothing more than our capacity to give oneself the rule - to use a rather Kantian expression - our possibility for living is greatly diminished.

3.

Glossing these interpretations somewhat, the importance then of askesis, as a work of self on self, is its relationship to the cultivation of autonomy in the face of forces which seek to undermine it, thus coopting us to sovereign power. For me, this practice has been aimed more often than not at those systems and forms of thought which reduce human beings to profiles, data-points, consumers, officially recognised identities and consequently into administrable subjects. This became particularly acute during the pandemic but it’s also what I was doing earlier by analysing contemporary social phenomena like consent classes, activist discourse around intersex conditions/DSDs, the problems of modern personhood and of course bureaucracy. The fruit of this counter-practice (as Claude called it) is autonomy of thought and action, sufficient perhaps to open the door to new ways of living and a form-of-life. Or as Agamben puts it, thought becomes “an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence.” Thought, thus conceived, isn’t merely something that happens inside an individual subject; thought is the experience of one's own potentiality, the awareness that one's life is not exhausted by its currently actualised form. Experimentum is then the appropriate term, since like all true experiments, those conducted in thought and action are a form of test, the ultimate outcome of which is not decided in advance and the failure of which would not extinguish the possibility of future experiments.

I would also contend that the aim of askesis is not only to maintain and build on our intellectual autonomy but also to influence what Martin Heidegger calls our Alltäglichkeit, usually translated in his works as ordinary-everydayness. This is the primary, unreflective way that humans practically inhabit the world. If this pre-reflective dwelling can be habituated with the character of inextinguishable potentiality then we might be a little closer to the more difficult ontological understanding of form-of-life pointed to by Agamben – though at this stage I’m inclined to view his version of the concept as a regulating ideal of political ontology rather than a design for life.

If for me the cultivation of autonomy has gone hand in hand with a critique of bureaucratic systems, that is because they have become the principle and near exclusive means by which power dominates our lives in late Modernity. Indeed, that domination is now so pervasive that it has come to define the language and concepts by which many people seek recognition and find orientation in society. Worst of all, because bureaucratic power presents itself as both technically necessary and politically neutral, it is rarely perceived as oppressive. Bureaucratic rule doesn’t work primarily through dramatic acts of sovereign power but through becoming part of our everydayness itself, shaping habits, categories, routines, and expectations until they appear natural and self-evident. When this insight is set alongside the decline of civil society which has accompanied successive waves of disenchantment in the modern West, then we can begin to see how the critique of bureaucratic rationality is all the more urgent, since there is precious little left outside that rationality to counter it.

There is therefore an unspoken but nevertheless clear normative distinction running through my writing between what I consider healthy and damaged forms-of-life. For instance, a healthy form-of-life must include practices of mourning and memory, as the act of working through the past in this fashion helps preserve autonomy against reduction into the abstract and alienating systems that govern us. en memoria mía is not the melancholy and demoralised yearning for times lost but a constant process of using nostalgia as a form of cultural archaeology and potential for renewal. Thus questions over heritage are always ultimately questions about the possibility of use in the present rather than fidelity to the past.

This is by design an emotional register that refutes any cheerful surrender to the so-called Eternal Now of Capitalist Realism, which is perhaps why I’ve moved away from the ideas of Hauntology towards a more anthropological understanding of cultural memory. Most recently I’ve been attracted to the what the German sociology Hartmut Rosa has described as the accelerated time regime of late modernity, which I agree with him is the seat of so much modern disaffection and alienation. Resistance to this time regime through practices of lingering, ritual, deep literacy and memorialising are approaches to living that open breathing room for possibility.

Conversely, I remain highly critical of those social movements that seek recognition and affirmation via the never-ending expansion of administrative, regulatory and procedural dispensations as if they were the benign hand of an imminent and caring God. It never ceases to amaze me how otherwise intelligent people surrender their autonomy and adopt the latest set of approved categories with which they are expected to make sense of their lives in the dying world. This is perhaps a more complicated story, and I hope to be able to give a less one-sided account of it at some point in the near future.

Finaly, if I was going to condense the role of askesis in shaping our possibilities for living into a simple definition, I might say that askesis denotes a disciplined practice of thought and action that is both a grounding and the holding of one’s ground from out of which a form-of-life might be cultivated. The ‘might be’ is essential here, since if we are talking about a true experimentum in living, then the possibility towards which the hypothesis points must also include its opposite, its possibility for failure. Nevertheless, no failure can extinguish the potential for living which ultimately defines the human being. 

Baconian Strategies, or the Possibility of Originality in AI Art (MidJourney 2)

 

As I discussed in the previous part, a key philosophical question for the future of AI image generation and art is the question of representation. Will future iterations of MidJourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc, just become ever more proficient at translating complex prompts into accurate visual representations, with a consequent loss of the wildness and "ghost in the machine" type interventions, which for me are its main selling point? Or will the technology retain, or even begin to coalesce around its own artistic tendencies, ending up less of a tool and more of a genuine collaborator?

One artist who appreciated more than most the impact of new technology on artistic practice was Francis Bacon. In interviews he used the expression "deepening the game" to describe the approach painters needed to take in response to the advent of photography and film, which had during his lifetime thoroughly challenged the role of painting in the visual arts. After all, if photography was now the dominant medium for representing reality, what could traditional painting, and especially figurative painting offer that went beyond mere illustration? Bacon's answer to this challenge was to develop a style and technique of painting that not only produced works of unsettling power, but which also assimilated photography into their mode of production. He made no secret of the fact that photographs - of his friends and lovers, from newspapers and magazines, and even pictures of old masters like Velazquez' portrait of Pope Innocent X - frequently formed the raw material for his own images. While other artists of the time abandoned the figure and moved into abstraction, Bacon took on photography and in a sense made the camera into a collaborator.

Artificial intelligence poses yet another challenge to artistic production on perhaps an even greater scale to photography. It not only takes aim at the skills of the digital artist or graphic designer, but puts into question the very notion of artistic authorship. As such, I've spent a fair amount of my CPU time on MidJourney attempting to apply some "Baconian strategies" to how I use it and the types of images I've tried to make. Some of this has consisted of pictures produced in Bacon's style - with a contemporary twist, while at other times I've attempted to develop a more general approach to image generation in which Bacon's concepts and insights on art are applied.

I should say from the outset that each  version of MidJourney has a different take on Bacon's style which reflects the differing levels of complexity in the coding and the way the developers have trained it. Generally speaking, versions 3 and 4 will give you more abstraction, dissonance and incoherence, whereas the different iterations of version 5 and the recently released version 6 will offer more realism, better figurative representation and more straightforward expressions of compositional coherence. As such, producing Bacon-esque images is not as straightforward as asking for so and so "in the style of Francis Bacon". Indeed as you will see, Bacon's painting themselves must often be brought in to the prompts to provide guidance and set examples for the AI to follow, as well as moving between versions and using counterintuitive phrases to excite more interesting results. Take for example the two images below produced by version 6, both of which use the prompt "Francis Bacon painting of a dog sitting peacefully in front of a large open window", with the addition that the one on the right also includes a jpg file of Bacon's Dog (1952) as part of the prompt.

Neither of these images really captures much of Bacon's style. The most one could say is that some of the "brushstrokes" for the surrounding rooms are vaguely reminiscent of how Bacon would situate his figures perhaps in the 1940s and 50s. I also like the way the flooring from Bacon's painting has been remixed into the picture on the right. But the figure of the dog itself is just too well rendered, too illustrative, and just, well, a bit dull. Switching down to V4 however gives us a very different result. The picture on the left uses the exact same prompt (including the image of Bacon's Dog) as the picture above on the right, but gives us an entirely different style which in my mind much more characteristic of Bacon's compositions and stark framing of the figure. The dog is perhaps still too much of a direct representation but the whole thing is more obviously modernist in execution. The translation of the window, however, has entirely lost its realism, and is now only hinted at with the arrangement of line and colour in the upper half of the picture. 

Finally the image on the right adds a longer description in near-natural language: "Francis Bacon painting of a dog sitting peacefully in front of a large open window, twisted and distorted anatomy. Mirrored reflections of 1940s interior room in the background. Geometric lines frame the main figure. Yellow, black and white colour palette with streaks of red and blue". Now we're getting somewhere. The dog has been messed up a good deal with odd proportions and the surreal inclusion of a lizard-like tail. The requested colours are present, though the background and interesting use of forced perspective lines is perhaps a little busy. But overall I'd say this is a fairly good attempt at a Bacon-like dog, although the extra data in the description - such as the mirrored reflections and 1940s interior - has not directly translated into the image.

This example demonstrates one of the key attractions of MidJourney, which is its penchant for chance and indeterminacy when interpreting the data fed into it. The most convincing of the prompts above includes a natural language element, with subject-predicate and statement parts, plus an actual image approximating the subject and style desired. Nevertheless, the output image is something quite different, neither exactly what we asked for, nor a complete departure. Getting to that point took me six prompts which each produced a grid of four images, many of which were no-where near the desired outcome. It's this element of chance and accident that brings MidJourney into true Bacon territory. Don't believe me? Take it from the man himself: The following is an exchange between Bacon and the art critic David Sylvester in an interview in 1966.

FB: I want a very ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.

DS: But you're sufficiently puritanical not to want to make the chance come too easily.

FB: I would like things to come easily, but you can't order chance. Because if you could, you would only be imposing another type of illustration.

DS: Are you aware of the moment when you find you are becoming free and the thing is taking you over?

FB: Well, very often the involuntary marks are much more deeply suggestive than others, and those are the moments when you feel that anything can happen.

Those of you conversant with the history of the surrealist movement will recognise the ethos at work here. Chance encounters, the unconscious, or the marvellous accident, were all themes and techniques developed in various ways by the surrealists (and before them in Dada) as a means to get behind - or beyond - the usual modes of representation in Western art. Bacon's courting of chance and accident in his work in part continues this tradition, but it also formed a key element of his personality, which came out in his often tempestuous relationships and predilection for gambling. But as we can see in the quote above he also wants to remain in overall control and desires "a very ordered image", not an abstraction produced by chance encounters between paint and canvas. Similar tensions are observable in his private life, which despite the reputation for sexual and alcoholic excess was similarly marked by a tendency towards control. I argued in an essay in 2018 that rather than being a simple facet of his character, this constant tension between chance and order constitutes Bacon's Form-of-Life; the wellspring if you like, from out of which came his remarkable paintings.  

Making a picture in MidJourney without an obvious subject can lead in odd directions. One way I like to start is by using the blend function in which up to five images can be fed into the AI which will then attempt to produce a single image which melds the aesthetic qualities of those in the prompt. It does this without any additional word prompting, instead relying entirely on its own internal logic. How exactly it does this, which elements it focuses on and which it ignores, is more than a little mysterious, and again like so many things with MidJourney, the results tend to vary between versions. One thing I've noticed consistently is that it will latch on to any anatomical shapes it can find and centre the image around them. If there is no central figure in the images fed into it, it will sometimes create one by anthropomorphising structures or textural elements. This can lead to a lot of strange results where limbs, faces or composite body parts will appear. This is usually the result of feeding highly non-comparable images into the prompt; but can, if you choose them wisely, lead to a fairly unique starting point to build your composition and improvise around results using additional word prompts or substituting new images into the prompt to take it in different directions. 

The image to the left started out as a blend which included some older Bacon-type images produced by MidJourney, plus some more photorealistic figurative data and "textural" matter. I call input images textural if their composition strongly influences the overall aesthetic style of the output without defining the subject or dictating overall coherence. Such images are often abstract or contain strong colours. After I had the initial blended image I began to push it more deliberately using word prompts in addition to the original images. First I started with “A young woman sits in a gloomy hotel room", before adding a description of her clothing and extra aesthetic filler such as "soft pastel thermal colour palette, variable contrast" and "dark urban skyline, shadowy figures, architectural drawings". Eventually I fed one of the resulting images back into the blend alongside material that suggested more of an urban setting. One of the images in the resulting grid had altered the position of the figure such that it looked reminiscent of a pole dancer. With this "involuntary mark" made I changed the word prompt pushing it more towards such an outcome, before finally switching in a textural image into the prompt, which I knew would have the effect of scrambling the anatomy of the figure (and losing its head!). The result was the image you see here; a unique, unplanned composition, that while utilising the indeterminacy of the AI's training is also ordered, thematic and recognisably figurative.

Bacon also employed a degree of improvisation in his work, gambling - as he saw it - a painting's fate on the next dramatic brush stroke. If it went wrong and could not be recovered he would frequently destroy the painting. But this approach could also yield desirable (though unconsciously produced) results, which for Bacon were a route away from illustration and towards what he described as a more violent return to reality itself. The most famous example of Bacon using this method is his Painting 1946, sometimes known as the butcher shop for its depiction of sides of beef. In an unusually detailed account of how one of his paintings was created he describes the intention of depicting a chimpanzee in grass, before then attempting to paint a bird of prey landing in a field. None of this came to fruition and in his laboured attempts he had produced such a strange mass of marks that it seemed as if the figurations he finally arrived at - the final assemblage of which owes a good deal to Poussin's The Adoration of the Golden Calf -  had formed by an act of his unconscious.

Francis Bacon, Painting 1946

What Bacon describes here - and what I've tried to apply with my image of the pole dancer - is I think one of the best strategies for getting unique images out of MidJourney. Images that do not privilege prompt following or exact representational translation but nevertheless aim at an ordered final result. It's also not random, since in order to get good results the user has to learn the aesthetic and interpretative tendencies of the AI and how to provoke it into making images with the desired artistic qualities and level of compositional coherence. It's also rarely instantaneous and involves a lot of tweaking and remixing of prompts. Sometimes, it leads nowhere worthwhile, and one is always pushing up against MidJourney's more conservative impulses, which are usually kitsch and highly influenced by American popular culture. When this happens, there is no choice but to abandon the thread and start off once again in a completely new direction.

In practice this involves, so to speak, mastering the dark side of MidJourney; deploying dissonance and contradiction, and getting a feel for the kinds of prompts that send the AI away from its basic representational paradigm. For example getting anything vaguely explicit into your compositions isn't easy. MidJourney's interface on Discord is moderated to exclude explicit images or words from prompts. This extends to slang or even phrases that could count as a double entendre. Despite the moderation, which also varies depending on the version you're using (earlier ones are generally more permissive for words, but also can't tell the difference between the Venus De Milo and a pornographic image, go figure) the system will frequently create images with explicit content, usually around the naked human form. In short, MidJourney has a predilection for boobs, and they sometimes pop up when you least expect them. It's just another little morsel of indeterminacy that makes using it fun. And on the plus side you're able to continue Western art's long tradition of fascination with the female form.

 

Testing the limits of the moderation, both around text and images is worth doing as it can be frustrating to have your prompts knocked back for seemingly innocuous infractions, e.g. the phrase "tight white" in any context cannot be used. This being said some surprising things do get through, so roll the dice, you never know what will come out the other end.

The moderation is meant to extend to horror and gore but there seems to be some intelligence to the way it is applied so that photorealistic images of injury or warped anatomy are excluded, but more painterly or cartoonish prompts get through. This is certainly beneficial if like me you want to produce figures with distortions or that generally look a bit roughed up. Combine this with the relative ease in making if not explicit then at least vaguely erotic images, then you have a good set of levers for adding more adult content into your compositions, and this is no bad thing. As I described in the last piece, the majority of content produced on MidJourney would in my opinion fall into the category of infantile. Thus I'm all in favour of pushing it towards a more mature audience. To my mind using cutting edge artificial intelligence to raise the aesthetic standard of erotica is a more venerable project than using it to produce endless Pokémon fan art.

 I've grouped the images I've created using these strategies in to two broad categories: After-Bacons, which try to produce images in Bacon's style but with subjects more in keeping with contemporary life in 2024; and Meta-Bacons (yeah I know it's a lame tag) which apply the conceptual toolkit described above to make images that do not look like paintings by Francis Bacon but nevertheless owe something to the ethos and approach to image-making. 

One example of the former I'm fond of is this picture of a man with a newspaper standing in a modern glass box apartment. Some of the elements, such as his white trainers and the fact he's holding a newspaper - which I recognise is hardly symbolic of the digital first era - were directly stated in the prompt, as was the high setting over the city; but the rest of the composition came about through trial and error, and improvising around marvellous accidents thrown up by MidJourney itself. I especially like the mirroring of the buildings outside the window on the presumably hyper-shiny floor of the flat. The figure is a delightful quandary. He looks anxious and out of place, despite the attempt seemingly to look relaxed with his newspaper, which in the way he's holding it appears as if he were trying to hide something in his hands. The clothing is also amusingly misplaced. Is that shorts over cut off leggings? The trainers are nicely done and draw attention to the shadow on the floor which instead of tracking the figure's silhouette, forms a incongruous rectangle. This is a scene that nicely captures the ennui and out-of-jointness amid superficial luxury that is symbolic 2020s Western culture.  

And as an example of a Meta-Bacon the image on the right, which I've titled An Unexpected Visitor, has all the qualities I'm looking for. The prompt developed over a couple of days and multiple iterations during which different colour palettes were tried out and the arrangement of the figure and background played around with. I'd been experimenting with trying to add something of Man Ray's surrealistic black and white photography to the mix and wanted a slightly erotic theme around a woman putting on stockings in a bedroom. the trouble was that most of the versions either produced a too photorealistic representation or the result was just too abstract and unnatural looking. One of the images included in the final prompt featured a classical statue without its head - which I'd included to give a nudge towards the body shape I wanted - but instead this seems to have filtered down into the final picture in the wonderful accident seen above, where the woman's head is unnaturally large and constructed as a kind of glowing neon sign. The head, turned to the figure's left, wears an anxious expression, and the left hand is held up at the throat as if startled by a sudden knock at the door. The dishevelled state of the bed mirrors the degraded framing of the image, as if it were a collage of old photographs. 

The figure itself is beautifully formed, non-symmetrical in appearance (which is something MidJourney often struggles with) and has these suggestive marks that could be either surface damage (in a photo collage) or symbolic of violence. Finally, there's the odd sprite-like entity at the head of the bed, that in its diaphanous appearance seems hardly there. It's an image that's full of intrigue and tension, combining a number of styles into a striking final result. As with the picture of the man in the apartment above, it grew out of a combination of intention and accident, where unintended results could be built upon and improvised around. I had only an outline of the subject I wanted, and the decision when to settle for a final image is somewhat arbitrary, after all, images can be endlessly remixed and new versions produced. In a similar fashion to how Bacon claimed his paintings were "let out", pictures on MidJourney are not so much finished as abandoned.

The jargon around AI such as ChatGPT and MidJourney would have the user known as a 'Prompt Engineer'. One influencer on Twitter even speculated this could be a future job title for anyone whose livelihood was under threat from the new technology. Sadly I think for many that will be the case,  much as previous rounds of automation rendered older skills obsolete, those former hands-on builders and creatives were pushed further away from the product of their labour, and now mostly supervised the machines that actually do the work. The threat now is that the inner logic and tendencies of the AI - which, we should remember, is never neutral, and can only approximate our world, with all its prejudices and darkness included - will come to supplant the inexhaustible creative potential of human beings. Humans do require paying, MidJourney just needs a monthly subscription. Thus you can be sure that company executives across the creative industries are gleefully adding up the possible savings from eliminating those same pesky humans from the production process. If the public gallery on MidJourney is anything to go by, then, MidJourney is well suited to being a workhorse for the mainstream of the culture industry.

But, as I hope I've been able to show, this technology also has artistic potential that can be brought out in collaboration with a user that seeks - so to speak - to meet the ghost in the machine halfway. I think this form of use - which rejects the standard representational paradigm, whereby AI should be a slave to our most asinine dreams - is a real and open possibility. It's certainly no more outlandish than the idea of artificial general intelligence or the notion of the human/AI singularity that excites transhumanists. Art, like cruelty, is one of the quintessential human things, and the leap from the Lascaux cave paintings to Duchamp's Fountain is perhaps greater than what artificial intelligence will do for us. 

My bet is that Francis Bacon would also not have been overly disturbed by AI image generation. There is no possibility of perfect prompt following since the meaning of the words pumped into it can have no objectively translatable aesthetic counterpart. To suggest otherwise is a category error. It's the same category error made by people who claim music can be reduced to maths. Adding image prompts into the mix only compounds this basic truth.  Consequently, this means is that there will always be a fundamental degree of chance and indeterminacy at work; a ghost in the machine, that by way of certain clairvoyant techniques can become the collaborator in an artist's work. If he were around now perhaps Bacon would have used MidJourney much as he used photography; as a source of inspiration, of subjects and new ways to show the figure. It will undoubtedly accelerate cultural production in the most shallow and commercially driven parts of society. But alongside that certainty there is also the possibility of taking up the challenge and deepening the game.