CASC investigates the hidden mechanisms through which AI reshapes social reality, culture, and human experience. Our interdisciplinary research explores the social, psychological, ethical, and cultural dimensions of AI. Key themes include:
AI, Loneliness, and Social Relationality — Effects of algorithmic interaction, platform isolation, and substitution of human connection with machine responsiveness.
The Work of Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Researcher: Howard Eiland
What might the writer of the well-known essay of the 1930s, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” have to teach us about the apparatus of artificial intelligence today? Would Walter Benjamin, with his punctuated associative way of thinking, look upon AI as blurring the line between tool and collaborator, as a kind of constructive construct or, perhaps, a fruitful soil requiring stewardship? What happens to aura, to authorship, to reproducibility when the production of texts is radically democratized and automated, as we see happening at present? The Artwork essay highlights the new field of action and space for play, the Spielraum, opened up by the cinema’s documentation and exploration of commonplace milieux. Can we likewise speak of a new generative interactive Spielraum opened up by our prompts to AI? What would Benjamin think of the welcoming, almost companionable chatbot voice and the prospect of machine consciousness or machine experience? Perhaps recalling the corporate powers behind the maturing film industry that he celebrated in the fast-changing Thirties, would he counterpoint the scientific, educational, and economic promise of the new digital technology with the social and political perils? Given the presence of deepfakes and other forms of misinformation in cyberspace today, wouldn’t
he surely be concerned for the survival of truth? Benjamin’s Arcades Project, begun in 1927 and left unfinished at his death in 1940, may help with these questions by virtue of its unique format and the mode of associative reading it favors. Its set of networked files or convolutes, with their reprocessing citational strategies and their system of sorting and cross-referencing, in certain ways anticipates the hypertextual connective tissue of the internet. A single detail of historical reference, in Benjamin’s vast collection, can propagate a multiplicity of queries and further references, generating a network of linkages in a variety of different subject areas. The concentrated detail expands, upon reading, into a dynamic constellation of matters. As the reader of The Arcades Project negotiates the streaming montage of citations and commentaries, so we today navigate the ocean of information on the internet, practicing, amid the multilevel traffic of postmodern times, that reception in distraction invoked toward the end of the Artwork essay.
Considering AI in the context of Benjaminian thinking may thus aid in apprehending what takes place, and what is at stake, in our unfolding, open-ended experience with the apparatus. We may find a model for that experience in the complex interplay—the synergy—of film camera and film actor that Benjamin analyzes in the Artwork essay; from that many-sided collaboration of the human and the mechanical is born a new art form, one that enlists the apparatus to reveal, develop, and preserve humanity. Film is to become a training ground of human perception. As Benjamin writes in the first version of the essay in 1935, the historical task facing film today is “to make the vast technological apparatus of our time into an object of human innervation.” It is a worthy goal for the digital age.
Howard Eiland is a scholar of Walter Benjamin and media theory, exploring intersections of culture, technology, and critical thought. He taught in the Literature Section at MIT from 1982 to 2014 and received the 2011 Levitan Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He has published articles on twentieth-century literature and philosophy and is author, with Michael W. Jennings, of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (2014). He is a translator of Benjamin’s works such as The Arcades Project (with Kevin McLaughlin), Berlin Childhood around 1900, and Origin of the German Trauerspiel. His Notes on Literature, Film, and Jazz appeared in 2019.
