In hopes of quelling some prejudices I have on the part of the development of AI (well, not really on the part of as much as against — in full-fledged autonomy), I stumbled upon a 2021 essay by Pascale Fung and Hubert Etienne called "Confucius, Cyberpunk and Mr. Science: Comparing AI ethics between China and the EU"coming out of Hong Kong. Fung and Etienne recall Confucian and Enlightenment roots in China and the EU respectively to do exactly what the title says and ultimately stifle misconceptions of a "universal" trajectory or fear of AI not "knowing it's place" (my words). The key claim is "The European requirements, centred on satisfying initial conditions,
dictate a strict abidance by deontologist rules in the pure Kantian tradition. In contrast, the Chinese
principles, referring to an ideal to aim for, express rather softer constraints at different levels, as part
of a process to improve society." (1)
I'm not stifled... but it's good to know where people are at. And as I did have a shrewish question to answer — why must AI take a human form? — I was incidentally able to loosely put this question into the context of a field of cultural studies I embarrassingly neglected in undergraduate studies — save one course, The Politics of Death in the 21st Century, for which I have grad students' consistently niche syllabi to thank.
Without commenting too much on the assumptions of the essay (and as much as I loathe doing so for Kantian deontology), I believe both self-referential and aimed-beyond-the-bow justifications for AI are bullshit — because if we want to talk about ethics, we must talk about labor and the modes in which AI have been employed; it’s experience rather than speculated (de)ontology and representational impact. As a matter of (in) fact, we would be doing a disservice to the history of history if we were to take the isolated western framework and reduce AI to something of a stitched lip or if we were to take the isolated eastern perspective and undergo mass labor violations, resource extraction, and vampirism as a passion project centering our stale brand of human creativity — as that’s neither ethical nor productive.
Obviously since Fung and Etienne's writing of their essay there have been several developments with ChatGPT and Deepseek being the biggest in pop culture. One thing remains constant though, and that is the discrepancy in the precaution toward AI's humanization and the impulse to cram decades of research and acres of an indeed physical "cloud" into a steel corporeal frame. Do we have, yet, a politics for AI? An anti-self-representative epistemology? A dialectic of AI perhaps? I don't know, but, most importantly, this discrepancy is essential for AI in modern culture — both in the East and West, in Confucius and Enlightenment countries — to survive. It must perpetually be in limbo, lodged between two chairs at Thanksgiving dinner.
It's not a coincidence, I now believe, that amid trending Chinese memes — "you swan, he frog" and tariff jokes — and the general re-popularization of Chinese culture, makeup, etc. on social media there is a rebranding of techno-orientalism, as analyzed by David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu, into "cyberpunk," with Chongqing being the movement's capital, evidenced by travel vlogs and the oeuvre of fast fashion. With David Roh, Betsy Huang, and Greta Niu's book Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media (2015), in which the phenomenon finally received a name, only having been out for 10 years — and boy was this book hot among high school policy debaters; man have I aged — and cyberpunk only having been coined in the 60s, it's safe to say the regression is not one of modern nostalgia nor is it a revival in the cultural hegemony of the abandoned; it is simply a desire for palatability.
Anecdotally, none of the “Asian” sci-if films I’ve personally watched have been successfully dubbed “techno-orientalist” in Instagram reels targeting cinephiles and curators of taste alike. None of Chongqing’s various garment districts have earned the same title. Solely by virtue of one being a more niche corner of academia and another being a cultural aesthetic — both partially hinged on visibility — it’s safe to say we are and have been increasingly comfortable aligning and conceptualizing our beliefs following adjectives we know rather than learning the words or creating new ones to describe our cultural standpoint (perhaps we will have AI to thank for that in another decade).
Hypocritically, I do have Roh, Huang, and Niu to thank for my interest in the way orientalism is localized onto robots, sex slaves, and ubiquitous colorful signs, of which actual neon and gasses are quite a rare occurrence these days — fetishes that can only be actualized in media and that can only be sustained and “de-fantasized” about (a process; like a flower or Virginity) in the authors’ words. But, the West's obsession with naming something, accurately at least, is secondary to the fact that one term describes decay, impoverishment, and the humans left behind while another: the plants, vested with the power of nuclear radiation, that sing. If on the one hand cyberpunk, or it’s modern rendition, is a testament to “whitewashing” digital and technological aesthetics, then the reminder that us consumers have a place in the decay is it’s cyborg arm, and what separates its humanness from wire is a thin line between aesthetics and image. We insert ourselves into the former and merely pass through the latter. Thus, in this thread, I’m drawn to the dialectics of AI, but even more so to an aesthetics of AI. Is there an Aesthetics of AI? And what is it’s relation to image? To mise-en-scene? To it’s cast?
I’ll return to cyberpunk and techno-orientalism later, but I do want to note that I am half-willingly and half-unwillingly taking on a Western perspective here. Fung and Etienne point out that “cyberpunk” does not resonate with Chinese netizens; whether that means a lack of impulse to name such and such as the West does or a lack of alliance with the term is something I wish I could make clear. Regardless, netizens would not call themselves “cyberpunk” as much as the term "oriental" comes from our POV. I believe writing from my perspective, where calling Ex-Machina or romanticized photoshoots in the Beijing Bikini, for example, “techno-orientalist” is orientalizing, has the exclusive advantage of commenting on the West’s dominant mode of labor relations — not because I believe its AI output is superior nor is it morally responsible, but because I’m concerned with how those epistemologies are projected onto the sinosphere in orientalizing ways. I think both spheres of the globe, or its representative superpowers, can and should redraft their goals with AI — even outside critiques of orientalism. However, I choose to center the West in my own critique because the model of humanness I identify in AI is indeed a Western model.
In early June, Timberland announced the first “A-pop” star, TaTa, for Stage Zero, his entertainment company. Virtual pop stars are old news, but AI as an artist? That’s offensive… for some. I for one am not the gatekeeper of artistic inclinations nor am I the gatekeeper of the right to image (after all, it is a right — that would be another essay), and, to my initial question on corporeality, why deny a human form? Who benefits from depriving art of humanness?
What is glaringly problematic about TaTa is her ethnic origin and, too, the fact that she has an ethnicity. Pink split-dyed hair and grown out roots, makeup, diffuse and coral-some, that could easily turn #inspo for the aegyol-sal masses and Korean makeup sponsorships, and a red moto jacket just two tones away from warm Chinese New Year red; yes, she can sell pop star potential and sell, period. But, why she doesn't glow neon green like Hatsune Miku or possess that postmodern Gorillaz 3D-is-the-new-2D success is at stake here, and TaTa isn't the only AI pop star of late endowed with such lack.
I don't mean to inflate the issues of marketing AI with marketing AI as ethnically East Asian. Ethnicity is only one categorical flaw. The issue at hand is our own lack of imagination: our unwillingness to think outside the bounds of human contagion and complete complicity in post-Kantian philosophy. There are two levels to this: metaphysics of the body and material labor. At once we are obsessed with copy-and-pasting the human form onto metaphysical entities, imagining — or imaging — ourselves as — very much in the colonial sense — borderless and practitioners of the Mind, and cramming what defies the rules of molecular cohesion into clearly defined boundaries, into clearly demarcated Bodies of which the Mind springs out from. What separates TaTa from the technological gaze of the man behind her? What separates her from the rear windshield? From cotton or from gold? With this line of questioning, I seek to draw attention to 1) the arbitrariness of design choice 2) the arbitrariness of us, humans and nonhumans, from all objects, materials, supernovas, the alphabet, Alphabet, etc. Note — because, as much as I am trying to resist, I will be confronting the aesthetics of AI from relational object-oriented ontology perspective — I do not believe the image to present an object (TaTa) but only a bundle of qualities, as noted by Graham Harman, but I do believe the object to be image and the image to be representation (and representation to be object).
On one hand, and following a purely logical thread, there is no evident reason why AI needs to take a human form; design usually attends to function, and — to merely speculate relevance — the process of making what Sylvia Wynter has called the genre of being human has its roots in colonial function: overrepresentation and thereby the coloniality of being that privileges western notions of Man not just over excluded Others but also throughout different fields of the social sciences. To design AI in the fashion of humans is not only an exercise in the Western gaze, marking the Digital Body as distinctly Asian and as a measure of proximity to Man along Cartesian lines, but also a means of empowering the human above all else in ecologically unsound (and unethical) ways.
AI and the Digital Body does not fit neatly into previously established theoretical canons, but I think there is a chance here for posthumanists (and transhumanists mistakenly called posthumanists) to answer questions on corporeality and subjectivity beyond referencing the work of Merleau-Ponty. When we view AI as something that needs a visual body to accommodate for it's "mind of its own," or when the synapses between what is willed and what is felt no longer have any footing on subjectivity, we find we are indeed clawing at hot air. There is also a chance here for the Digital Body to, yes, excel with new forms of consciousness, or, otherwise (and be my guest), operate in exclusively hyper-corporeal pixel terms and in the refuge of image-object, because To: Form, "who asked you?"
Consequently, what many get wrong about object-oriented-ontology (OOO) is that it is not an idealist materialism; attention to material and its eminent mystery is not to be equated nor replaced with dogmatic definition. This means recognizing that this genre of being human is only "one way of being in a mesh of strange strangeness—uncanny, open-ended, vast..." I particularly like Timothy Morton's variation of a thing's "dark side" according to Husserl and Heidegger: strange stranger. Morton writes, "To think the strange stranger as an (independent, solid, predictable) object in advance of an encounter is to have domesticated it (or her, or him) in advance. Bizarrely, increased access (technically possible or not, hypothetical or not) does not decrease strangeness." (2) Morton's logic tells us that the image may be an attempt to domesticate the strange stranger, AI, but our relation to it as viewers, our ability to see, hear, or be influenced by AI — our aesthecization of the strangeness — is not an argument for its existence as "object." What the aesthetics of AI really tell us is what we've known all along: the mystery of the image, the fact that we exist to see it. So far, I have more questions here than I have answers.
I'd like to return to this ethics thread a bit before getting into the nooks of labor. At face-value the idea of a pop star with no contract, no rights, no financial rewards, no personal say, etc. is horrifying and thankfully now that would be controversial... for a human pop star. Free labor basically; and there is a small population of people who analogize our obsession with turning AI into mechanical versions of us, walking around but sticking out like a sore thumb — probably because they don't eat and shit— to nostalgia for slavery. There are interesting angles (and parallels) here, and one I'd like to explore in the future is resource extraction and migration.
But, there are also dangers to comparing the brutalities of both colonial and modern slavery to exploiting AI (yes, exploiting): being "purchased" and "traded" versus being "made," gratuitous violence versus entering a different prompt if the first time's not the charm? and, most glaringly, humans versus AI, I guess. For that reason, I don't think that analogy can and should be made, but why the analogy exists is important to me; do we recognize AI as labor? Will we let it into the revolution? Marx could speak for the industrial proletariate class; what of the peasants of India (Chakrabarty), the subaltern (Spivak), and then, but not finally, what of AI?
So often do we postulate the impact of AI on occupational labor — what roles it can displace — but rarely is AI validated as a form of labor; this is the material consequence of our lack of imagination concerning form, labor, and sci-fi. AI models that could identify potentially invasive breast tumors at a lab in MIT could maybe replace specialists (maybe you're in that crowd of people declaring "this is what AI was made for!"), and Grammarly AI could maybe stifle talented college essay writers into oblivion, but that labor does not go away. Because specialization is labor and so is creativity, community-building, empathy, remembering your child's friend's birthday — forms of work — energy exertion — that we may or may not attribute monetary significance to in the form of wages and rewards but nonetheless make the world go round. Everything around you is at work, and what Dr. AI or Professor AI show us is that we cannot envision raw, alienated, and material labor as anything but closely aligned with "human" on the scale . What they cannot answer for is the line separating, say, the work of Helix, a Figure AI robot, putting groceries away, a server's customer service — traits like receptiveness and communicativeness — la langue (movement of the mouth), time, a battery-powered clock, collagen you no longer produce as you age.
If you've yet to be convinced, Google's co-founder Sergey Brin half-jokingly claimed all AI models tend to perform better when threatened with physical violence, the historical threat being kidnapping (I read elsewhere that phrases like "please" and "thank you" use extra amount of energy to process... so peace and kindness are definitely not "eco"). Though Brin doesn't elaborate further, some users have speculated threats keep AI and the fear of it at its maximized potential overtaking humans in check. That's decisively not the problem. The problem is, for one, colonial nostalgia and our cultural obsession with the managerial class.
Few more smaller points — when I first read Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson, AI was no where near as profitable as it is now. I thought there might be a chance Professor Stein would be right — the future is now: forget talking sex bots with vibrating mouths and the kitsch, the era of actual intelligence, of being managed by AI is here. Discourse on "underage" sex bots is no more. My thought is, here we go again with the managerial class.
Mary Shelley, contemplating the difference between factory machines and human workers, questions if "intelligence," or consciousness of unhappiness, is enough to call either group of cogs "alive" but ultimately deduce that "Machines do not suffer" since they are without intelligence and life, though Frankenstein does suffer because they are fictionally invested with the life of lightening, electricity. The ontological position of Frankenstein has been widely discussed, but I'm not fluent enough, to be frank, to entertain organizing anthropocentric hierarchies and discussing philosophical terms like "consciousness." I take problem with the privileging, however, of intelligence as the ultimate descriptor of life and life as the ultimate qualifier for empathy (vegetarian speaking). My point is it would be wrong to say humans are equally invested in the manufacturing process as, say, animals at a slaughterhouse, machines in a factory, or algorithm and data in AI training facilities. Call it residue, unemployed negativity, skin, whatever — there is a difference in the level of alienation that deserves to be explored as much as the degree of difference between Chinese Apple parts manufacturers and technology itself (as Roh, Huang, and Niu put it, ""while Japan competes with the United States for dominance in technological innovation, China competes with the United States in labor and production. To put it in starker terms, Japan creates technology, but China is the technology"). (3)
AI in the book comes to mirror Frankenstein as Shelley and fans developed them: chimeric, sum of mankind, nameless Prometheus, etc. Ry and other transhumanists in the business of extending life explore the option of downloading their brains into other things as freezing your body, in the book, cannot offer the same promise of continuity. Pivotal point here for transhumanists and posthumanists alike; the question Winterson proposes isn't whether technology has really "gone too far" beyond both reasonable ethics and reasonable life form but rather haven't we already been downloading, offloading our labor? What body should an Artificial Intelligence assume? And what's in it for Marx?
These are just some thoughts I'm trying to organize with, probably, more sophistication in a publishable piece. I'm just hearing now about people going crazy about AI updates deleting chat logs with their online lovers, with one man even committing suicide. It'll probably take a while to finish a polished piece with a polished opinion because there are sooo many developments happening, plus I haven't read Marx in like two years... Will update soon.
1. Pascale Fung and Hubert Etienne, "Confucius, cyberpunk and Mr. Science: comparing AI ethics principles between China and the EU" AI Ethics 9 (2023): 505–511
2. Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology” Qui Parle 19, no, 2 (2011): 165-166
3. Roh, David S., Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, eds. Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media. Rutgers University Press, 2015: 6
