Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-17
Generative AI: a poetics of automatic profanation
I The machine that prays without believing
In 2024 a diffusion model learns to paint Byzantine virgins from 1,200 museum images and fourteen minutes of fine-tuning. It does not know what a virgin is. It knows which pixels usually surround a halo.
That is not blasphemy: it is something worse and more interesting. Blasphemy respects the sacred enough to offend it. The machine ignores it.
“To profane is to give back to common use what was set apart. The generative profanes with no ceremony: it simply does not see the fence.”
II Anatomy of the gesture
| Blasphemy | Automatic profanation | |
|---|---|---|
| Knows what it is touching | yes | no |
| Intention | to offend | to complete the sentence |
| Cost | expulsion | 0.003 USD per image |
| Effect | it reinforces the fence | it makes the fence invisible |
The cost matters. When offending costs a life, offending means something. At three thousandths of a dollar an act, the offence stops being a gesture and becomes a fee.
III Formula of the wearing-down
- S
- sacred charge of the material
- N
- number of generations
- C
- unit cost of generating
With C \to 0 and N \to \infty, profanation tends to infinity and the sacred charge tends to zero. Not because anybody attacks it: because it wears out from being used.
IV Antithesis: the aura does not die, it gets cheap
Benjamin said technical reproduction withers the aura. He fell short out of optimism: reproduction withered it one copy at a time.
The generative does not copy. It interpolates. It produces the space between two images that never existed, and that space also has an aura for the four seconds it takes another model to fill it.
The aura did not disappear. It became a consumable.
V Household ritualsafe
-
01
Pick an image that means something to you — a family photo, a painting, an icon.
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02
Describe it in writing in twenty words, as if it were a prompt.
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03
Read it aloud.
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04
Write down what was lost between the image and the twenty words.
You need generate nothing. The exercise happens in the distance between what you saw and what you managed to say about it.
VI Risks
There is a comfortable reading of all this: that the machine desacralises and that this liberates.
No. What disappears is not the power but its location. When nothing is set apart, there is also no outside from which to contest what is inside. Total profanation and total consecration produce the same landscape: one with no edges.
And whoever builds the model does keep an inside: the weights, the training set, the list of what the system refuses to draw. The fence moved. It did not fall.
VII Coda
If the sacred was whatever could not be repeated without permission, and now everything repeats with nobody to ask, then the question is no longer what we are profaning.
It is what we are setting apart without noticing, right now, so that in twenty years somebody can profane it at three thousandths of a dollar an image.