Nearly Half A Century On...

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I realised today that I, for the first time in my life, had failed to keep up with current technology: specifically, AI. The move from from chat-based interfaces to multi-modal agentic models over the last few [months, to be honest] has taken me rather by surprise. I've always taken some pride in the fact that I can always [at least cursorily] keep up with things techno-logic-al, and I find for the first time in my life that I've been blind-sided by the breakneck speed of developments in AI and its deployment in real-world situations. I aim to catch up; even at my advanced age there is simply no excuse for laxity in these matters: current knowledge should not be the exclusive domain of the young, don't you know. Anyhow, I decided to dip my toes a little further into the - as yet - little-known waters of agentic AI, and posed a question that models my undergraduate thesis' inquiry [although my dissertation was a good deal longer in the end]:

“I need a discursive essay of no more than 2,000 words on the nature of indexality in photography, referencing iconography in the plastic arts, specifically painting of the Dutch school, e.g Vermeer, Van Eyck, etc. Reference should be made to the works of Sontag, Barthes, Berger, Benjamin, et al.”

The resultant consensus of output from three LLMs - albeit on the limited level of free of charge tiers of operation, came up with, as expected, a lot of first year undergraduate padding and stylistic gaucheness; but one paragraph stood out from the rest: it mirrored exactly my arguments from nearly fifty years ago in my final year dissertation on Roland Barthes' assertions about the indexical veracity of photography. I quote directly from the AI output:

'[This leads to a second disagreement:]...whether photography’s indexicality marks a decisive ontological break from painting or is instead an intensified form of representation that remains entangled with interpretation. I take the former position, but with a crucial qualification. The index guarantees that something was there, but it does not dictate what it means. Iconicity offers coherence and legibility, but risks obscuring the contingent and fleeting. Photography’s cultural power lies precisely in this tension: the promise of direct access to the actual, forever shadowed by the necessity of interpretation.'

Not only has the consensus of the three LLMs arrived at the same conclusion I did all those years back as an impecunious art student of the [very] pre-AI era, but the output has been very much personalised [humanised?] by the use of the phrase '... I take the former position...' Whatever your take on it, this paragraph alone alone alludes to more potential depth in machine learning than I would hitherto have acknowledged. However, I caveat that with the fact that I have prior - pre AI - knowledge of the subject under question and have not done a plagiarism check on the above. Nevertheless, an instructive exercise...

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