Animation and Artificial Intelligence: Cartoons and the eclipse of semiosis

By: John Reid Perkins-Buzo

 

ARTICLE INFO:
Volume: 10
Issue: 01:Summer 2024
ISSN: 2459-2943
DOI: 10.18680/hss.2024.0009
Pages: 159-175
Lic.: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
KEYWORDS:
Animation
Puppet theatre
Japanese robot animation
Thunderbirds
Go Nagai

 

ABSTRACT

In the second volume of Technics and Time, Disorientation, Bernard Stiegler finds that Artificial Intelligence (AI) profoundly shapes memory and, thereby, identity and time (2009:162-187). Through this shaping, AI weakens these two since it excludes human beings from the production of every sort, both material and intellectual. Human labor, with its concomitant radication in shared cultural and historical experience, is lost or diminished, creating a desiccation of meaning and the devaluation of human existence. Anthroposemiosis, described by John Deely as “the fulfillment of ‘human nature’ in the creations of ‘culture,’ scientific and literary alike” (1994:118), no longer perfuses the entire production of culture but is supplemented or even replaced by other-than-human “generative transformers.” This is especially true of the art form of animation, which has striven to communicate human culture through moving images, mainly visual stories and motion graphics. As AI takes over larger and larger portions of the animation workflow, questions arise concerning the very nature of the activity. We can ask with Steigler, “Who animates what?” (2009:177). Will the who, as it becomes excluded, leave the what meaningless? By closely examining the AI generative image software, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s Sora, I will propose a tentative response to these difficult issues. Drawing on C.S. Peirce’s essay “Man’s Glassy Essence,” I explore his musement that human beings truly exist on the level of shared cultural realities and that these “are no mere metaphors…” (1892:21). Animation which persists at the shared level of anthroposemiosis, and resists industrialized AI, maybe one way that “the semiotic animal … becomes aware of the historicity [νόμος] within human experience of nature [φύσις] as a whole” (Deely 2009:107).

 
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