BRAIN-dle
At times, when I am doing my tasks, I feel my brain hurting. Not my abstract brain — my physical skull. It hurts when I push certain thoughts, when I try to answer questions that were never part of the natural scope of human thinking. It is very different from decoding language, solving puzzles, or finding the right word for Wordle. Those feel familiar. What I am describing does not. I create rubrics and follow metrics and write comparative scores; those are not always straightforward. There is a history before data. For example – task 1 - I see images and ask myself: why and how does a Halloween scene not have a Halloween atmosphere? First, I point to image one and explain that children usually walk along with each other; they don’t walk as if they are in a procession. There are many human nuances. Then I go to the second image and explain: this Halloween scene appears more natural, but some children have costumes that are repeated, which is very likely to happen because parents can buy costumes from large-scale stores. So if two children have the same costumes but have different bags and different shoes, it appears natural. But if they do have the same hair, would you consider that a probable natural human-made situation? At this part, my brain is not overwhelmed; my brain does not hurt. I am still feeling the pleasure of making the puzzle. Why does a roof not look like a roof? Why does the delivery pizza person not look like a delivery person? In going through the messages and comparisons, the model and I go in a duel in which I need to decide if it’s better to opt for natural composition or natural rendering. How to measure the metrics for a Halloween scene in which kids appear in a procession in a very unrealistic procession, or the scene in which the Halloween scene shows kids going to a porch in a realistic manner but clearly shows kids with repeated costumes? I am still well, brain is tired but skull is not hurting yet. When I keep investigating further situations - for example, how to find a language and a concept that I never had to use or explain - my skull starts to feel a strange weight. As my thoughts are being taken through paths that maybe my nature, my ancestors had never tried. So my skull hurts. At this moment, I am not sure if I am about to biologically evolve or if I am biologically fading.
Ai-ness is not only a generation that appears overly cinematic or one that creates a human with more than five fingers. Ai-ness is not only the artificial and unrealistic gaze. Ai-ness lies in a very subtle and still evident trace.
So for this task, the model created two sets of images, and each of them shows past and present moments with an illustration of a calendar. The icons and descriptions of the Ai-generated calendar made me go to the very concept of how we perceive time. The model created a literal line above the calendar with arrows to indicate the passage of time, and although it was following the prompt and the logic, it was clear a non-human perception of how we visualize time and calendar.
I went through 16 images, and for each metric I didn’t check only the realness of each calendar or timeline, but felt my skull hurting, the repetition of things that are not so obvious, repetition for visualizing and explaining over and over nuances and concepts that were not programmed or familiar within my own memory.
That’s my job, and I go over completions and rubrics and metrics and scores, and for each evaluation it’s not only a question of voting for what looks more natural or not. Better or not. Bias or not. Ethical or not.
It’s a matter to ask myself the most elementary questions about how and why we look and act the way we do in the most banal moments.