Generative AI: The Cultural Dominatrix Indefinitely Extending Postmodernism

There is a popular tourist attraction near where I live called the Ballard Locks. It is an old system of locks that raises and lowers boats traveling between Puget Sound and Lake Washington. It also has a pretty interesting fish ladder, which is why more than 1 million people visit every year. Recently, a small change to one of the signs that explains the site caused some controversy, and AI was the reason. Many people see this as another example of AI entering human life. But I see this ordinary AI-generated sign as a sign of something else. It offers a useful look at the cultural period we are living in today.

When an image of the pope, a white jacket, Harry Potter, a fashion brand, a famous American university, and an email all become major news stories because of generative artificial intelligence, that tells us a lot. But here is something even more telling: AI-generated content has become so common in modern culture that even the Army Corps of Engineers is using it to create a sign for a tourist attraction.

AI tools can now create cultural works quickly, in large quantities, and for people everywhere to use. This means AI is turning large parts of cultural production into an industrial process. More importantly, it is doing this through several kinds of postmodern cultural thinking. In other words, important parts of postmodern culture have themselves become industrialized. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to late postmodernism.

AI and the Pope

In March 2023, pictures appeared online showing the pope wearing a stylish, expensive-looking white puffy jacket. The image spread quickly and received millions of views. Even major news outlets reported on it. Many people were genuinely surprised to think the pope would wear such a jacket because, well, he is the pope. Fortunately, the pope did not need to respond, because the image had been created using the AI image generator Midjourney. Still, many people believed it was real. Our next example brings together two very different kinds of culture: a fantasy world and a fashion brand.

Fashionista Potter

When you hear the word “Balenciaga,” you probably do not think of Harry Potter unless you know about the combination of the two made possible by AI, known as Harry Potter by Balenciaga. What am I talking about? In 2023, someone uploaded a YouTube video that used AI to imagine the Harry Potter characters as Balenciaga fashion models. The video became extremely popular and has nearly 15 million views. It even became a meme format of its own, inspiring versions such as Star Wars by Balenciaga, Avengers by Balenciaga, and Lord of the Rings by Balenciaga. At least the video was made for fun. Our next example clearly shows that sometimes it is better not to use AI at all.

Not…A Good Idea

In February 2023, the EDI office at Vanderbilt University sent an email to students and staff about the recent deadly school shooting at Michigan State University. In small print at the bottom, the email admitted that its text was a paraphrase produced by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. As you might expect, people did not react well. The students locked the person responsible in her office for three days and gave her only Funyuns and Mountain Dew to survive on before letting her out. Just kidding! That did not really happen. But the university did offer a mild apology, a couple of people who had signed the original email stepped away from their duties, and other administrators made it clear that they were not responsible. Good times.

So What?

You might be thinking, “So what? AI was used to make a few things. Big deal.” That is a fair point, and it is true, even if it sounds boring. But I am looking at these examples as part of a bigger change: generative AI is being used to create culture so often that it has become part of not just Internet culture but also popular and mainstream culture. And let us not forget that the ordinary sign at the locks shows that AI has spread even into everyday culture.

But let us take a closer look at these cultural works made with AI. They show three kinds of postmodern thinking described by three philosophers. Understanding these ideas can help us make sense of what is happening.

Hyperreality

People have been using generative AI to make silly pictures ever since it became available to the public, because it is so much fun! I can confirm that I have used AI to turn my poodle mix into a tattooed motorcycle gang boss riding a Harley. Who has not? Anyway, the picture of the pope in a particular white puffy jacket seemed to strike a chord with the public. It spread rapidly through both online and traditional media, and it fooled many people. As it turns out, a French philosopher known for his unusual ideas was talking about something like this back in the 1980s.

That philosopher was Jean Baudrillard. I like to call him the prophet of postmodernism, although he would probably hate that name, because so many of his ideas are easy to see in the world today. He described a cultural situation in which copies and simulations become more important than reality itself. He called the final stage of this process hyperreality. The fake pope image fooled many people, but I would not go so far as to say that simulations have replaced reality itself. Still, my uncontrollable sweating is a good sign that we may be getting closer and closer to hyperreality—or perhaps to the sun. I will let you decide which explanation fits better.

In any case, AI is now widely used to create cultural works. Its ability to produce convincing content may push us, or even shove us, toward hyperreality. To me, that suggests AI is producing the kind of culture Baudrillard described. AI can now create simulated and hyperreal cultural works on a large scale.

If you do not think the pope image shows that we are losing touch with reality, consider this. Whenever something unusual or impressive appears in culture, people quickly accuse it of being AI-generated, whether or not that is true. I call this losing touch with reality because of generative AI. But if you prefer another phrase, such as having fuzzy white feelings of uncertainty, that works too. I am sure there is some value in questioning whether anything that could possibly have been made with AI really is AI-generated. I am just not sure that this habit is useful beyond possibly earning an unwanted stay in a mental institution. I suppose we have to choose which battles are worth fighting.

Pastiche

Besides being very clever, Harry Potter by Balenciaga shows another kind of postmodern culture: pastiche, a concept associated with Fredric Jameson. In his famous essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson wrote: “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody.” In simpler terms, pastiche copies a particular style without necessarily making fun of it or trying to criticize it. Harry Potter by Balenciaga fits this idea quite well. The video's creator, Alexander Niklass, explained his intentions to the New Yorker, which reported: “The combination of child-friendly film and adult luxury fashion neither held any particular symbolism nor expressed an artistic intent. It’s ‘entertainment,’ Niklass said. Yet the video’s most compelling aspect might be its vacuity, a meaningless collision of cultural symbols. The nonsense is the point.” I have to say, it is hard to find a better example of the kind of pastiche Jameson described.

Remember that AI uses pastiche when it creates things. When someone asks AI to write an email, it does not simply pull out a ready-made response that was programmed in advance. Instead, it combines different patterns it has learned to produce a clear and connected text. It does this without deliberately making fun of anything or trying to criticize it, while imitating the particular style of an email. AI is especially good at creating cultural works this way, so we see pastiche often in Internet and popular culture. This means AI has turned Jameson's kind of pastiche into an industrial process. In this view, originality has become harder to find, and culture increasingly combines forms that already exist. There you have it.

The Death of the Author

I understand why someone might want to use AI to write an email about something emotionally difficult. Writing that kind of message is not easy. But I also understand the temptation to take a huge amount of cocaine and go on an extravagant spree in the local red-light district. Somehow, I have managed to avoid both. Anyway, this particular use of AI highlights another postmodern idea: the death of the author.

Roland Barthes wrote “The Death of the Author” in the late 1960s. His main idea was that meaning ultimately comes from the audience, not the person who created the work. Before then, people usually linked a text's meaning to what its author intended to say. Barthes disagreed. He argued that meaning comes from the way readers interact with a text, rather than from trying to guess what the author had in mind. What I especially like about his theory is that the more readers try to work out an author's intentions, the more they create their own meanings without realizing it. Barthes, you absolute champion.

Think about it: Barthes described the death of the author, and AI seems to say, “Yes,” while showing what that idea might look like in practice. Who is the author of something AI creates? Is it the person who entered the prompt? At best, a skilled prompt writer might be like a conceptual artist, someone whose main contribution is the idea behind the work. So is the author the training data or the feedback used by the system? No. AI cannot create anything until someone gives it a prompt, but it is still difficult to identify a single author. This creates a problem for the idea of authorship, because the author may seem to be missing. If there is no clear author of an AI-generated work, the audience is left to decide what it means. This applies not just to text but also to sound, video, photos, code, and more. That makes three kinds of postmodern cultural thinking that AI appears to express.

Oh, the Consequences

Who would have thought that an image of the pope in a puffy white jacket, a video showing Harry Potter characters as Balenciaga models, and a poorly judged email from university administrators would all demonstrate how generative AI brings postmodern cultural ideas to life as it creates cultural works? Let us not forget that AI has been producing large amounts of culture ever since it became widely available to the public. An earlier technology, the Internet, turned the distribution of culture into an industrial process. Now generative AI is doing much the same thing to the production of culture.

Notice that all these examples come from early 2023, just months after ChatGPT was released to the public. Today, AI-generated content is so common that it rarely makes the news. This shows how much AI has become a normal part of public life.

So…Who’s Late?

First, let us explain why this does not mean we have moved beyond postmodernism. Here is an analogy. Suppose I collect Volvos and own five of them one day. The next day, I own 20. Does having so many Volvos suddenly make me a Ford collector? If not, why should a stronger form of postmodernism mean that we have left postmodernism behind? AI gives us more postmodernism, not less.

I also think it is fair to say that this stage of postmodernism is different from what came before. The fact that it has become more intense already makes it different. But something else is even more important: until recently, humans were the ones producing culture. That is no longer entirely true because of artificial intelligence. Yes, I will give you a moment to think about that.

Remember, if AI were used only by one nerdy guy living in his mother's basement, its effect on culture would probably be too small to notice. These three examples from popular culture, and especially the ordinary sign at the locks, show that the opposite has happened.

And because no new set of widely accepted cultural ideas has become nearly as influential as the existing ones, we now have digital programs producing cultural works on a large scale using ideas that have remained influential since the 1960s and 1980s. Depending on how you feel about postmodernism, you may love or hate what this means.

Here is how the process works. We are living in a postmodern cultural period. AI was developed during this period, under the influence of postmodernism, and it draws heavily on the culture around it. It creates cultural works by using postmodern ways of thinking. Those works spread throughout society, and AI is then trained on them, continuing a cycle in which the same cultural ideas are repeated and intensified even as they lose their freshness. To me, all of this clearly points to a late stage of postmodernism. We could call it delayed postmodernism if you prefer. I am a teacher, after all…

The End… Or Is It?

The only way I can see us moving beyond this period is if an advanced machine uses its own senses to create an original cultural work without any human input. Such a development would challenge how humanity sees itself and could push us into a new cultural period. Why? Let me put it as gently as I can: we are far too emotionally fragile to have our belief that humans are the only creators of art and culture shattered without serious self-reflection and major changes in society and culture afterward. This would be true even if our role as the only creators existed mainly as an idea.

The Takeaway—For Your Food For Thought

So, what do the pope in a white jacket, Harry Potter characters dressed as Balenciaga models, and a badly judged university email have in common? They show the growing cultural power of generative artificial intelligence. It seems that AI has brought us into late postmodernism.