The Age of Noise w/ Eryk Salvaggio

Computer Says Maybe

What happens if you ask a generative AI image model to show you what Picasso’s work would have looked like if he lived in Japan in the 16th century? Would it produce something totally new, or just mash together stereotypical aesthetics from Picasso’s work, and 16th century Japan?

This week, Alix interviewed Eryk Salvaggio, who shares his ideas around how we are moving away from ‘the age of information’ and into an age of noise, where we’ve progressed so far into a paradigm of easy and frictionless information sharing, that information has transformed into an overwhelming wall of noise.

So if everything is just noise, what do we filter out and keep in — and what systems do we use to do that?

Further reading:

• Visit Eryk’s Website
• Cybernetic Forests — Eryk’s newsletter on tech and culture
• Our upcoming event: Insight Session: The politics, power, and responsibility of AI procurement with Bianca Wylie
• Our newsletter, which shares invites to events like the above, and other interesting bits

Eryk Salvaggio has been making tech-critical art since the dawn of the Internet. Now he’s a blend of artist, tech policy researcher, and writer focused on a critical approach to AI. He is the Emerging Technologies Research Advisor at the Siegel Family Endowment, an instructor in Responsible AI at Elisava Barcelona School of Design, a researcher at the metaLab (at) Harvard University’s AI Pedagogy Project, one of the top contributors to Tech Policy Press, and an artist whose work has been shown at festivals including SXSW, DEFCON, and Unsound.